subject: Epson Stylus SX600FW Ink [print this page] Epson appears to be trying to move the inkjet all-in-one printer into the small business arena with its Stylus SX600FW. Its design seems to owe something to Canon both in its colour scheme and look. The price is about 100.
Clearly some thought has gone into the looks of the machine. When not in use the Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) on top closes to keep the shape nice and smooth. At the front there is a colour LCD viewing screen and a number of buttons for controlling what your are doing. Further to the right is a number pad and controls for switching between scanning, copying, faxing and printing together with a button to start and stop operations.
The Epson Stylus SX600FW has slots for the more popular memory cards as well as PictBridge for digital cameras and flash drives, all of which are situated at the bottom front left of the machine. Housed at the rear are connections for USB, networking, phone line and phone set.
Standard drivers are provided along with a Web-to-print utility which fits prints of websites onto paper, and Event Manager, which lets you assign specific applications to the start, copy, e-mail and PDF buttons, and Abby Finereader to handle Optical Character Recognition.
The Epson Stylus SX600FW will let you carry out a number of functions when not connected to a computer such as document copying and printing from memory cards. More unusually, you can print lined and squared paper as well as use an image from a memory card as a watermark on printed paper. It has to be said that this is a rather expensive way of creating your own stationary.
The Epson Stylus SX600FW printed black and white pages at a rate of 14 pages per minute (ppm) while colour ones took six ppm, not the 38ppm quoted by Epson. These results were more than acceptable for a sub 100 all-in-one printer. A photograph printed in roughly one minute 20 seconds and this was OK.
Prints from the SX600FW were mixed. Mono text on ordinary paper was not as well defined as it might have been but photos printed on decent quality photo paper were fine with accurate colouring and plenty of detail. Graphics were fine despite the odd bit of banding but photocopies proved to be a bit light.
The Epson Stylus SX600FW ink cartridges come in two capacities. The higher capacity ones are the T070140 black, T071240 cyan, T071340 magenta and T071440 yellow. Better still, there are compatible cartridges available which are even cheaper.
For faxing the SX600FW offers colour and black and white capability at speeds of up to 33.6kbps, it can store as many as 60 numbers, will send a page in around three seconds and its memory will store up to 180 pages.
The Epson Stylus SX600FW if good value for money at under 100. You get a wide variety of functions and for the price it makes a good job of all of them.
