Epson Stylus D120 review

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Verdict:

The D120 is incredibly fast when printing correspondence-quality text and its black ink costs are fairly low. However, its photo printing is poor and its printing doesn't have the all-round quality of Canon's PIXMA iP4300. Even so, its text printing is by far the fastest in the group. The D120 is well-suited to printing large numbers of text documents in an office or home office environment, but the iP4300 is a better choice for a home printer.

Review Date: 10 Oct 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Epson's Stylus D120 business inkjet looks and feels like a larger version of the D92.

It has a single rear-loading paper tray, which can take up to 120 sheets of A4. Sadly, the extendable output tray is flimsy and unable to hold on to more than a few pages at a time. The printer comes with two black ink cartridges, which can be inserted at the same time. This makes it less likely that you'll run out of ink in the middle of printing a long document.

The D120 isn't designed to be a high-quality photo printer, and although its photo prints had hardly any graininess their overall quality was disappointing. The prints' colours weren't as accurate as those produced by Epson's Stylus Photo R285 or HP's Photosmart D7160. Black tones were fairly good, but we noticed a purple tint on our photos. This was particularly noticeable on pictures with a lot of dark, earthy tones, and made them appear murky and underexposed. The effect was also visible on brightly coloured images, making some shades appear muted or discoloured.

The D120's draft text print speed was very quick, but the prints were full of broken characters, which could be difficult to read. Its normal text print speed was the fastest in the group, and faster than many of the printers' draft speeds. The resulting correspondence-quality text was dense and black, with no rough edges. We were also impressed by the quality of our mixed-colour documents, which had sharp and dark black text, and accurate colours on both images and text. However, colour documents printed very slowly.

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