Epson Stylus DX4400 review

The DX4400 is an entry-level inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP).

Its plain case is very simple and doesn't include a colour screen, an automatic document feeder or even a memory card reader, which is supplied with the similarly priced Stylus DX5050 (reviewed in Labs, Shopper August 2007).

The design is typical of the current Stylus range, but with only five buttons and three indicator LEDs the controls are minimal. Although they aren't particularly difficult to interpret and use, this still makes it harder to use than an MFP with a screen.

We were disappointed by the print quality and speed, particularly when printing text. At Draft quality our prints were faint and extremely difficult to read. At the default Text setting, our documents were readable, but the quality was still poor. Print speed was reasonable at 13.6 pages per minute (ppm), but the tops of characters on some lines failed to print, and text was poorly defined. The Text & Image setting produced dense text without too much spidering or fuzziness at the edges, but it printed pages at just 2.4ppm. We used the same setting for our mixed colour print test, and it produced satisfactory results at a speed of 1.5ppm, although large blocks of colour showed slight graining.

Like many Epson printers, the DX4400 is significantly better at photo printing than at text. Our 6x4in prints in particular were sharp and clear, without any visible graininess or banding. However, yellow tones appeared to be too intense in all our photos. Our pictures were also slow to print, with six 6x4in photographs taking just over 34 minutes.

Print head alignment is a tedious process that involves selecting the best-quality result from a group of colour bars. This was rather hit and miss, and it took a few attempts to get the heads correctly aligned. This reduced striping and banding to a small degree, but didn't have much effect on the overall print quality.

The scanner performed well, with bright, accurate colours and no unwanted visual artefacts, and the scanner driver offered more control over the process than most. Scan times weren't particularly fast, at 45 seconds for our 300dpi A4 document and 40 seconds for our 6x4in photo at 600x1,200dpi.

The copier function offers basic enlargement and reduction, but without a screen or an automatic document feeder, it's suitable only for occasional light use. It's also quite slow, taking 46 seconds to copy an A4 mono document and 52 seconds for a colour one. The DX4400 uses four colour cartridges, with replacements available for a fairly economical £7 each.

Although the DX4400 is cheap, it is let down by its lack of features, painfully slow print speeds and poor-quality text printing. Canon's PIXMA MP160 is a better choice.