The latest offering Epson is their stylus SX218 which is a multifunction printer for those on a budget. It offers a good range of functions with a small price tag but other printers in this category are renowned for being expensive to run because their printer ink cartridges are expensive. Epson SX218 ink cartridges consists of four colour inks which is an economical system but a set of cartridges still costs £30 which is not a lot less than the printer itself. There are compatible Epson ink cartridges available for the SX218 which cost half the price of the originals and last just as long. The Stylus SX218 performs well at all of the tasks it designed to do, not only that it performs some of them better than you expect it to. The print quality in particular is very good and the SX218 is capable of printing great quality photos as well all the everyday documents to a very high standard. The A4 flatbed scanner is impressive with a good colour reproduction that stays true to the original source. The copier function is one the SX218’s stand alone features which means the device doesn’t need to be connected to a PC in order to operate. The copier is little limited due to its maximum of nine copies at a time but it’s still a convenient feature for small qualities. Another standalone feature of the SX218 is direct printing from a memory card or digital camera thanks to it’s built in memory card reader and PictBridge connection. One weak point of the SX218 is its printing speed and this also affects the copying function, Epson’s official claim of 34ppm (pages per minutes) is greatly exaggerated and the real world ppm is around 4ppm in good quality print settings. Overall the Stylus SX218 is a versatile machine that’s offers a lot for the price, but performance is lacking in some areas.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.