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.

The budget inkjet printer market is flooded with printers that promise to be the perfect solution to your everyday printing needs. The D92 is the latest offering from Epson and on first impressions it seems to be a great little printer, but I have tested enough printers to know not to judge an inkjet printer by its price tag. The Epson D92 is cheap but what aren’t cheap are the Epson D92 ink cartridges. You would think that the cheapest printer in the range would have cheaper printer cartridges than the more expensive printers but this is not the case as printer ink cartridges for the D92 are the same ones as used in a lot of other mid range Epson printer so therefore cost the same. Things start to improve when you start printing with the D92 because you find that the print quality is surprisingly good and it can print of a wide variety of media including photo paper envelopes of various sizes up to a maximum of A4. Printing photos emphasizes the D92’s ability to print pin sharp results but its only reveals the D92 weak point which is printing speed. A medium sized photo takes around 11 minutes which makes it one of the slowest printers I ever come across. Apart from the print speed the Stylus D92 is hard to find fault with, it just does what it designed to do.

Colour laser printers are usually found in large offices as a workhorse for a large work group of users, but Samsung aim to change that with the CLP-300n and open up laser printing to the home and small business user. The cost of the printer cartridges is one of things that make colour laser printers not viable to low volume users but the Samsung CLP-300n toner cartridges have been redesigned to suit these needs. They are smaller and yield fewer pages so they cost less to buy and still maintain a pretty good cost per page. There are also compatible Samsung toner cartridges avaible which can save 50% on the overall running costs of the CLP-300n. The printer is fully network ready with a built-in Ethernet port which enables it to be connected to a network and shared between numerous PCs. Printing speeds of monochrome documents is good, 16ppm is the official figure and the CLP-300n gets surprisingly close to this figure in tests. Colour printing speed is less impressive however, colour documents can be print at a maximum rate of 4ppm which is very slow for a laser printer (but still a lot faster than any inkjet). Print quality is very good for what is basically an entry level printer, all types of prints are sharp and clear, whether your printing a basic page of text or high resolution artwork graphics. The CLP-300n is said to be the world’s smallest colour laser printer and that’s not hard to believe when you see it in the flesh, it has a footprint not that much bigger than your average inkjet printer and should fit on the smallest most cluttered of desks.