Epson DX4400 - Review
A Multi-Function printer for under Forty Quid?
When I had an email through from my regular hardware supplier offering me a Multi-Function printer for under Forty Pounds I had to have a look at it.
The Epson DX4400 is the beast on offer. Being a sceptic at heart my first thought was that they would be ripping us off with expensive ink cartridges, but the DX4400 uses the Epson T0711 (Cheetah) series of four colour pigmented ink cartridges, which go into most of Epsons non photo printers these days. They are a high quality cartridge and we have compatible cartridges available to reduce your printing costs even more. Using Epson’s own multi pack cartridge (C13T0715) which is available from Stinkyink.Com at £24.99 including VAT and delivery gives a cost per page of just over 0.02 for text and about 0.05 for colour – this is of course significantly reduced by utilising the compatibles.
We were suprised at how noisy the machine was. In our office environment it wasn’t a particular problem, but for home use you would certainly know about it when it came time to print. Print speeds weren’t particularly fast either. A five page text document took more than two minutes in normal print mode, which means in reality about 2.5PPM. A five page text and graphics job produced a speed of under a page a minute. Is it a case of you get what you pay for?
The printer is conventionally styled, and has a simple control panel with five buttons and three lights which is enough for all main functions. The printer doesn’t have memory card slots so you won’t be able to print directly from photo memory cards, nor any connectivity for cameras – I think if you wanted to print photos then you wouldn’t be interested in buying this printer – horses for courses. It does have a flatbed scanner which was easy to use, the whole machine connected very easily to my PC and is generally impressivly small.
Conclusions, this printer sits right at the bottom end of the Multi-Function market, and I would think is aimed at the home user who doesn’t do much printing, but occasionally needs to photo copy some documents and in that context it is brilliant!, just don’t expect too much from it and you won’t be disappinted
