Epson Stylus Office BX300F review

The BX300F is a hefty beast, and an impressive package considering the price.

It's aimed at the small business and serious home user. The built-in fax machine has five speed dial buttons and an automatic document feeder. There are four separate ink tanks and a memory card reader, though the LCD screen is just a two-line text display.

Prints were very pleasing thanks to excellent colour reproduction. Our 6x4 photos looked particularly good, with balanced colour and solid detail. Monochrome shots were great, too. The only thing that let the Epson down was speed. Nearly 14 minutes for five 6x4 prints is far too long. Worse, the BX300F took six and a half minutes to output a single A4 image, one of the slowest times we've seen. And it spent a thumb-twiddling 18 minutes printing ten pages of best quality text, though a similar quantity of mixed text and colour graphics took only ten minutes.

In terms of print quality, the Epson was great, the only niggle being that draft quality text was more gray than black. To compound the slow performance on straight printing tasks, however, a full page photocopy earned the BX300F another 'slowest on test' award. In total, our print tests took an hour and four minutes to complete - 20 minutes more than the next slowest competitor.

Scan times were better, with our A4 page taking a reasonable 33 seconds. The image was very accurate, and although colours looked a bit cool, some tweaking in a photo editor would sort that.

Currently on sale at £50, the Epson looks like fantastic value: it has plenty of features, and it's really well made too. If it hadn't been so sluggish, it would undoubtedly have taken an award. As it stands, you might well consider it at this price, especially as replacing all the inks will set you back less than £32 - but it really is very, very slow.