Epson NX515 All-in-One Printer

The Epson Stylus NX515 is a very fast all-in-one printer. It comes with WiFi networking built in and can do pretty much everything that much bigger and more expensive all-in-one printers can do--but it does them without taking much space, or too much cash. Photos have excellent color depth and print quickly. For the price--just over $100--the NX515 is a best bet.

There's plenty to like about the Epson Stylus NX515. It's got a nice, small footprint, if slightly larger than comparable Canon models; but like Canon all-in-ones, the Stylus makes the best of its space, with a folding 2.5" color LCD that helps keep this printer small. The large LCD is clear and easy to read, which is helpful since that's where the wireless settings are made.

The test of a wireless-enabled printer is how easy is it to configure, and the Epson came through with flying colors. Like the all-in-ones from Brother, the NX515 was able to immediately find and connect to my secure network after I entered my password. A test page came out quickly to confirm that all was working well. But even when wireless printers are easy to configure, they're not always fast when printing across a network. Not so in this case. At regular quality, monochrome pages were coming out in roughly six seconds (with a first page out in about 19 seconds). Epson claims as many as 36 pages per minute monochrome or color, but I didn't see that at normal print quality.

The photo prints were excellent. A 4x6 photo printed at normal quality took about a minute to print. The print was dry and the colors were clear and rich. The NX515 uses four ink tanks so presumably you can replace only the ones that run dry. Ultimately, however, I'm not sure the print quality was much beyond the Canon Pixma MP490, which uses only two ink tanks. The NX515 does print much faster than the MP490.

Like most printers in this class, basic photo-editing options are on board, so cropping and otherwise manipulating photos is simple--though again, given the size and clarity of the LCD display, this is a less painful task than on some other printers. And like other printers in this price range, you'll be able to choose from a wide range of media cards.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.