Epson Stylus NX400 All-in-One Printer

If you really want an all-in-one for under $100, and you don't intend to use it too much, the Epson Stylus NX400 All-in-One Printer will fit the bill. It's particularly strong on photo printing, and while its color-graphic printing is passable, it won't knock your socks off. But if you need to print a lot, and high-quality graphics are important, spend some extra money and buy something in the $200-$300 range.

The Epson Stylus NX400 All-in-One Printer is an inexpensive all-in-one that will work best for occasional home printing. It comes with a built-in copier and scanner, and is PictBridge compatible, so you can print directly from a digital camera.

Print speeds were acceptable but not exceptional. After a 23-second warm-up, the first page of a large PDF file took about 18 seconds to come out, with the whole job averaging about 13.5 seconds/page for the whole job. The small black-and-white font looked perfectly sharp and was easy to read. It took just over a minute to print out three color pages loaded with graphics, an average of about 23 seconds per page. The colors were rich if unremarkable, but perfectly adequate for home needs.

I thought the printer worked better for photos than graphics, since Epson's DURABrite ink comes out smudge-free. A colorful 4x6 photo came out in 1:37 (at regular photo quality). I used the sample Epson Semi-Gloss Paper and was very impressed with the quality of the print. Colors were true and rich; and even the smallest details on the print were clear and sharp. Prints can be made from memory cards and photos can be edited using the printer's 2.5-inch tilt LCD (Auto Photo Correction helps automatically correct poorly exposed images and enhance skin tones).

A close-up look at large-font printing showed that there was little ink-bleed into the paper, and while letters were sharp, it didn't require a magnifying glass to see some rough edges. I printed using both cheap copy paper (not really recommended for inkjet printers) and the sample of Epson Premium Bright White Paper. There's no question that the latter looks great (particularly compared to the copy paper) and is recommended for important print jobs.

The scanner and copier worked fine. It took about 40 seconds to scan a single color-graphic page to a PDF.