Epson Stylus S20 review

Epson's latest inkjet eschews bells and whistles like card readers and an LCD; it's just a straight photo and document printer, hence the low price.

The compact black unit is minimalist, adorned only with a power button and another to condition the printer when new cartridges are fitted. The process is painless thanks to the absence of tricky mechanisms. The four colour DURABrite inks just slip into their designated slots with a firm push. They can be replaced individually if one colour runs out faster. You can find each for as little as £5 if you shop around, but at a quoted 180 to 270 pages (these figures are usually optimistic) they don't last as long as some; higher capacity units are available at extra cost. Overall, the S20 seems about average in terms of running costs.

The sheet feeders are detachable, rather than flimsy hinged or collapsible types. You'll only save desk space if you can find somewhere to put them when not in use, but they feel reassuringly robust.

Draft text printed at 10 pages per minute, reasonable for a budget inkjet; output was a bit faint, but acceptable. At normal quality, the S20 took a yawn-inducing four minutes and 42 seconds for ten pages, probably due to a text smoothing option that's activated in this mode. It did make characters look nicely dark and sharp. A colour business document with text, charts and graphics made us wait 15 minutes, matching Lexmark's Z1420 as the slowest printer we've seen this year, but thin lines in our graphs remained sharp. Photos were extraordinarily slow. Some showed a light, pink-tinged fringe and banding at the edges of the page. Epson warns that this can occur, but it persisted even after running the cleaning procedures, calling into question the S20's borderless ability.

This didn't affect other photos, which showed good detail, though they looked unremarkable and a touch darker than expected. Overall, the S20 is neat but doesn't measure up against rivals such as Canon's PIXMA iP2600.

Author: Alan Stonebridge