Epson Stylus SX515W review

Epson is trying to differentiate between different ranges of its inkjet all-in-ones by aiming some at small office customers and others at photo enthusiasts.

The Stylus SX515W is one of the latter and builds on other successful Epson models, adding in a wireless connection.

Coloured in gloss and textured black, it has the same basic design as many of its stablemates, with a near-vertical paper feed tray at the rear feeding through to a telescopic output tray at the front. To the left of the full A4 flatbed is a smart and well-designed control panel, with flush-fitting, well-labelled control buttons.

There's a 63mm colour LCD display that hinges up from behind the control panel to show control menus and photo thumbnails when you're printing from memory cards or PictBridge. Two sockets, which combine to accommodate most of the common memory card standards, are positioned at the left of the front panel, although it's a little disappointing that the PictBridge socket doesn't double as a USB drive connection.

At the back are sockets for USB and Ethernet, but one of the reasons for considering this machine over its rivals is its built-in wifi connection. Wireless setup is surprisingly easy, but you do have to connect the all-in-one to your Mac temporarily via USB and enter your router's password.

Bundled software comprises Abbyy Finereader Sprint 5 for OCR and Epson's own Easy Photo Print, which offers basic editing, but doesn't really compare to iPhoto.

Epson claims the Stylus SX515W is capable of 36 pages per minutes (ppm) in both black and colour print. While this is a silly figure, this machine does have a good turn of speed for an inkjet. Our 10-page black text print finished in 49 seconds, or 12.2ppm, and the five-page black text and colour job took 53 seconds, a speed of 5.66ppm. These may appear fairly modest speeds, but in comparison with similar models, such as the Canon Pixma MP620 (5.6ppm black and 3.3ppm colour) or Lexmark's X7675 (5.3ppm and 2.1ppm), they're considerably quicker.

Epson also claims the SX515W can print a photo in 20 seconds, and while you can get a borderless draft print out in this sort of time, the image isn't up to much. A good-quality print takes around two minutes 10 seconds, which isn't particularly quick.

Both standard and fine print modes give clean, unblemished prints, although some shadow detail tends towards black and colours are a little too bland. Overall, they're above reasonable, though.

You can sometimes tell an Epson plain paper print from most of its rivals by the unevenness of the characters. Under a loupe, you can see the slight misalignment of each line of print, but to the naked eye it just looks slightly fuzzy. This is also true of the Stylus SX515W, but it's not too pronounced and the print is adequate for general correspondence. Colour print on plain paper is bright, with little sign of intrusive dot patterns.

There was one obvious problem with our review machine. Epson is the best-known manufacturer of piezo-electric inkjet printers, where the ink droplets are created using minute electrostatic pumps. This means there's no heating cycle involved as there is with Canon, HP or Lexmark's thermal print heads, but it can also mean Epson's print heads are more liable to clog. We saw this during our tests where, even using brand-new ink tanks on a new review sample, some of the prints came through with colour bands.This is likely to be an isolated example, however, as we have rarely seen this kind of fault in a review machine.