Epson Expression Home XP-212 review

Where the XP-212 excels in comparison to most budget MFPs is in its photo printing. While its prints aren’t flawless, they are very good indeed, with particularly good reproduction of delicately shaded areas and dark low-contrast images. Red tones are slightly over-saturated, which can make many skin tones look a little flushed, but we’re very impressed with the printer engine’s overall photo quality. Our prints took quite a while to emerge, though, with a pair of 10×8 photos printing in twelve minutes, 37 seconds, while a set of six 6x4in prints took the better part of 23 minutes.

Epson Expression Home XP-212 Scanner

The MFP’s scanner is the 1,200×2,400dpi CIS affair of the sort that you’ll find in many budget Epson all-in-ones. It’s rather slow, but its quality is better than that of many similarly priced rivals. Both our preview scan and 150dpi scan took 14 seconds, while a 300dpi document scan took 33 seconds. A 600dpi photo scan took 35 seconds, but raising the quality to 1,200dpi took it up to two minutes and 15 seconds.

Scan quality is among the best we’ve seen from an MFP in this price range, and the well-designed interface provides great control over your scanned images. There was plenty of contrast visible between a range of close grey tones, and fine detail was captured precisely. Areas of subtle shading, such as the tones of a summer sky, were accurately reproduced with smooth gradation, rather that sudden leaps from one colour to an entirely different tone. A 150dpi text scan was easy to read at 100 per cent magnification, but if you need to zoom in and crop areas, we suggest scanning text at 300dpi.

Copy quality is fair, with good contrast and images and reasonably sharp text at even 8pt, but with a slight red tint on images in our colour copy test. Colour copies were also particularly slow, at 47 seconds, while mono copies came out in a more reasonable 17 seconds. This all-in-one’s print and scan quality are good, and it’s very cheap to buy, but only a few pounds more will buy you the faster Epson XP-312.