Epson Stylus D120 review

As befits a machine marketed for business use, the D120 is larger than other budget inkjets, and has a more reassuring heft to it.

The relatively stylish case is all black, with a tinted plastic lid that enables you to get a glimpse of what's going on under the hood. The paper trays are noticeably sturdier than the Lexmark's (see page 67), the output tray clicking firmly home when not in use. The paper input guides are adjusted by a plastic ratchet, ensuring they stay in place to keep sheets feeding accurately.

When we came to install the cartridges, we found the D120's four inks - black, cyan, magenta and yellow - were housed in four separate cartridges. This means that if a single colour runs out, your won't be forced to replace the entire set of colours, as you would with the HP or Lexmark.It sounds sensible in theory, but manufacturing individual cartridges is likely to use more resources, and in practice print costs don't necessarily work out any lower for printers with separate inks. So it's a point of interest rather than a definite benefit.

The overall impression of quality continued as we began printing. While none of the inkjets on test exactly whispered, in everyday use the Epson proved a good deal less noisy than the Lexmark, which is worth bearing in mind if you plan to have a printer sitting beside you on the desktop.

Epson's printer driver offers a number of sophisticated adjustments, but manages to keep things simple for less fussy jobs with a choice of Draft, Text, Text & Images, Photo and Best Photo. Out 10 page text document appeared in a creditable 71 seconds, and when we switched to Draft, the pages positively flew out, finishing in a super-fast 33 seconds.

Photo printing was much slower, thanks to the high resolution offered by the Best Photo setting. Our set of six 6x4 inch prints came out in eight and a half minutes, but - rather unexpectedly for a business printer - were well worth the wait.In contrast to the output from the Lexmark Z2420, they suffered no banding and none of the tell-tale 'dottiness' produced by some budget inkjets around the edges of pale areas. Colours didn't have the punchy vibrancy of the HP D2560's output (see page 64), but were the most neutral and accurate of these three machines.

The Epson is a good all-rounder: a solid four-colour business machine that makes a more than passable job of photos when necessary. But it's pipped to the post on value by the equally impressive HP, at half the price.