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Currently available for £60, Epson’s Stylus SX425 wireless MFP costs less than many single-function inkjets. It makes no claims of business-grade speeds or professional-standard photo printing but instead aims to provide an all-round balance of performance and value. The MFP has a 1,200×2,400dpi scanner, decent memory card support and even a tiny colour screen that allows you to – with a fair bit of button-pressing – connect the printer to your wireless network without having to first configure its wireless settings via USB. Because of this, getting the SX425W to talk to your PC is almost as easy over WiFi as it is with USB.
The printer takes four individual ink cartridges from Epson’s Fox and Apple ranges. These are filled with pigment-based Durabite ink. This pigmented ink might not have the perfectly accurate colouration of the Claria inks used by Epson’s more photo-oriented printers, but it’s vivid, durable and relatively inexpensive. We always recommend buying the highest-yield inks your printer can handle. In this case, that’s the Apple range, which costs just over £10 per cartridge, producing page costs of 5.6p for colour and 2.3p for black ink. That adds up to 7.9p per mixed-colour page, which isn’t bad for a low-cost MFP. A 6x4in photo on Epson’s Premium Glossy paper will cost you around 28p.
Print quality is good, too. It suffers the usual Epson consumer inkjet problem of ghostly-pale draft text, but we were entirely happy with both the quality of the mono letters its Text mode produced and with the reproduction of our colour business documents in Text & Graphics mode. Mono text was dark, with crisp edges to the letters, while our colour graphs and illustrations were beautifully clear and vivid.
We were also pleasantly surprised by the quality of the SX425W’s photos. Traditionally, pigmented ink doesn’t produce the best photos and can be prone to a reflective effect known as bronzing. Here, colours were accurate and lifelike, while contrast was excellent on even the most challenging images. Black tones were perfectly dark and white areas suffered only from an almost imperceptible magenta tinge. Epson’s Premium Glossy photo paper was reflective, but there weren’t any odd tints to it.
Scan quality was of the high standard we’ve come to expect from the CIS scanners used even in Epson’s cheaper MFPs. The resolution of 1,200×2,400dpi is certainly good enough for most home users, although you might want a dedicated higher-resolution scanner if you’re archiving family photos or records for posterity. Both photo and document scans were sharp and very accurately coloured. Copy quality is also good for both colour and mono documents.
The Stylus SX425W represents a serious move in the right direction for Epson’s cheaper MFPs. Its print speeds are none too fast, but with good quality and reasonable print costs it’s well worth buying. It’s a Budget Buy and, remarkably, still worth having if the cost goes up a bit.
