With it its low price and compact design the Epson Stylus SX400 is the affordable solution for the home office environment. It offers high quality printing, scanning and copying with direct PC-free printing from its memory card slot and PictBridge connection. Although the purchase price for the SX400 is affordable its Genuine Epson printer ink cartridges are not quite so impressive. A set of Epson SX400 ink cartridges costs £30 from high street retailers, which consists of four separate ink cartridges one for each of the colours. Fortunately there are compatible Epson ink cartridges available for the SX400 and not only do they cost half the price of the originals they also print the same amount of pages. The SX400 produces good quality print output when it comes to everyday documents and produces surprisingly good photo prints too considering it only uses a four colour ink system. It’s hard to believe that the SX400 contains an A4 flatbed scanner when you it see it in the flesh because its so compact, but it does and the scanner performs very well despite its compact slimline design. The resulting scanned documents are very accurate representations of the originals and produced with good speed. The photo copier shares the same scanner for producing copies with a good balance of speed and quality without the need for a PC to be present. The other PC-free function of the SX400 is direct printing from a memory card or digital camera, where images can be previewed on the built in LCD screen before printing. Strangely the best quality setting is not selectable when printing directly which is somewhat of a mystery. The SX400 is a overall a very versatile device and offers all of this with a very affordable price tag.