C-NET Gadget Reviews

The price of inkjet printers has got so low that they are practically giving them away. In fact that is basically what they are doing, selling them at cost price in order to make the profit exclusively through sales of replacement printer ink cartridges. The Epson SX200 is the same, its extremely cheap purchase price hides that fact that a set of Epson SX200 ink cartridges actually costs the same as the printer. It not all bad though, luckily there are cheaper alternatives avaible in the form of compatible Epson ink cartridges which cost on average 50% less than the genuine Epson products. As a result the Epson SX200 becomes quite an attractive prospect with it long list of features and low price tag. Scanning and copying can be preformed on documents and images up to A4 in size and the quality of scanning at least is very good for such a basic machine, colours in the scans are a good representation of the original which is the sign of a good scanner. The quality of copying is slightly lower but its designed for speed more than anything else but having aids that the quality is good enough for most people’s everyday needs. The SX200 has a built-in memory card reader which is capable of reading a range of memory cards including Compact Flash, SD and Memory Stick Pro enabling direct printing without the need for a PC. The print quality is the SX200’s best feature, it performs brilliantly on all types of documents from plain text to high resolution photographs. Printing speed however is not the SX200’s strongest point in fact is probably it weakest with a maximum speed of 4ppm (pages per minute). Slow printing speeds are not enough to change the fact in general the Stylus SX200 is a great little printer and offers good value for money for people on a tight budget.