Spring Drives

The Epson Stylus SX400 is an affordable multifunctional device that offers printing, scanning and photo copying facilities. The printer offers up a class leading 5760dpi x 1440dpi resolution which results in pin sharp output no matter what type of documents. Photo prints are particularly good with quality close to that form a professional photo lab. The speed in which the prints are produced is less impressive however, Epson state in the official figures for the SX400 that its capable of printing 34ppm (pages per minute) but we couldn’t get anywhere near this figure. The best we could manage was 10ppm printing text in draft quality where the print is barely visible, increasing the quality setting to standard decreased the speed to 4ppm which is slow even for a printer with the SX400’s price tag. Epson have been known in the past for exaggerating their figures of print speeds and they are also known for their expensive printer ink cartridges. The Epson SX400 ink cartridges consists of four individual ink tanks, one for each colour, which is great because you only have to replace the colours you use but a set of genuine Epson inks costs £30 and compared to the cost of the compatibles from third party manufactures the genuine Epson ink cartridge seem a little overpriced. The SX400 also has scanning and photo copying facilities both of which perform to a good standard, the scanner offer an impressive 1200dpi resolution and produces great results for a variety of documents as does the copy which makes use of the same A4 flat bed. Overall the SX400 seem to be a solid all-round device and this is also displayed in its impressive build quality.