Epson Stylus SX215 put through it’s paces

What kind of all-in-one printer can you get for £45 ?  We take a look at the Epson sx215, which looks like a great little machine  , but with some shortcomings. At this price point ,  we are looking at the home user who wants to print, scan and copy . 

The printer is a conventional black box design, and has a control panel mounted on the left hand side.  It’s very surprising to see a full-colour LCD display set into the middle of the controls . Although it’s small, it’s big enough to be used to display photo thumbnails and select menu options .

 The machine has  four mode buttons behind the LCD, including specific options to print photos and to print an index sheet from a memory card. A single card slot in the front, left corner takes SD, MemoryStick and xD cards . In front of the LCD is a  handy  button to switch between A4 and 15 x 10cm paper.

Both paper types feed from a  angled, telescopic paper tray at the back to a horizontal, tray at the front. There’s only a single USB socket at the back ,  there is no wireless capacity with this printer and to be honest we wouldn’t expect to see one at this price point  .

One thing missing from the control panel is a maintenance button for running print checks or changing ink cartridges, and you need to know the magic shortcut of pressing the Index Sheet and Scan buttons together to reach the maintenance menu – shame it’s not marked on the panel .

Fitting and replacing epson ink cartridges is easy, as the four cartridges plug directly into their places in the head carrier. The cartridges are numbered T0711 TO T0714 inclusive.

Epson quote the Stylus SX215 can reach 32ppm printing black and 15ppm printing colour, in draft mode. We think England would have more chance of winning the World cup than this prediction coming true. Sure enough we were right particularly as the machine could only manage 3.5ppm on our five-page black text print and 1.2ppm on the black text and colour graphics test.

As usual, the result of the 20-page test was faster , but in this case only by 0.5ppm, giving a top speed of 4ppm. This is slow and the 20-page document took over five minutes to complete.

A single page colour A4 copy took 1min 11secs and a 15 x 10cm photo took 3mins 20secs printing in best mode from a PC. This is slow! 

Actually, best to leave it overnight working in the garage, as we measured a maximum noise level of 77dBA at half a metre, when feeding paper. This is very loud and would be distracting if, for example, you were trying to take a phone call while printing a multi-page document on your desk.

Given this is a budget printer, the print quality is average at best.  Better results would be found from a budget Canon or HP machine, as this printer has a distinct rough edge to printed curves, with some colour bleeding  .

Colours in business graphics are bright and generally smooth, with solid fills showing few signs of dither patterns or other artefacts. Photo prints are excellent, with clean outlines, smooth transitions from colour to colour and a fair amount of detail in hard-to-reproduce shadows .

The Stylus SX215 can take the  Epson cheetah T0715 multipack of cartridges, which retail for around £30. Or compatible ink cartridges are also available at a fraction of the price.

Verdict

For its price, there’s plenty to like about the Epson Stylus SX215, such as its LCD display, simple operation and excellent photo prints. There are a few things to weigh against these, though, with its very noisy paper feed, universally slow print .

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