Epson Stylus Photo PX800FW all-in-one wireless printer

Epson tries to keep up with the competition

Printing from an SD card, the PX800FW produced a 15 x 10cm photo in 21 seconds. This is considerably quicker than any other all-in-one we've tested recently has managed and a good deal quicker than from most dedicated photo printers. This isn't a draft mode print, either, but with all settings at normal - the print is very good quality and quite suitable for sticking in an album or giving to members of your family.

Load paper and photo blanks from the front - can this be an Epson?

That said, the print quality on plain paper isn't as good. The PX800FW's six-ink system produces good, strong colours, but black is more of a dark grey. Curves and diagonal edges are more jagged than those produced by some of the printer's rivals. While results are generally acceptable, there are better choices than this machine, if plain paper print is your prime requirement.

Epson offers two sets of cartridges for the PX800FW: a standard-yield set and high-yield cartridges. Epson recommends the former even though the high yield option offers better running costs. Using this set, an ISO-standard black page should cost you around 2.5p and a colour one just over 10p. Both these costs are reasonable for an inkjet printer.

Individual colours cost £9.10 a pop - a set of six will set you back £47.

A desk friendly 45 x 39 x 20cm

Scanning for copies is relatively quick. We produced a single-page, full-colour 200ppi copy from the flatbed in 17 seconds, which isn’t going to hold anyone up too much, and a five-page, black text copy from the ADF completed in 56 seconds - around 5ppm.

Scanning a photo print produced reasonable results, though the colours were slightly blue in comparison with the original. Nothing that couldn’t be compensated for, though. Black text 300ppi scans for OCR came through cleanly, with little touch-up editing needed on serif or sans serif fonts.

Supplied software includes Epson's suite of photo, CD and Web printing utilities, and a copy of ABBYY Finereader optical character recognition (OCR) app. There are versions of the OCR software for PCs and for Macs, though the latter is a version, 5.0, behind the Windows release, 6.0. The most recent version of the software is 9.0, by the way.

Verdict

Epson's Stylus Photo PX800FW is a good photo-centric all-in-one. Though the print quality is nothing special when you print on plain paper, the PX800FW has an excellent photo print speed, and the quality's not bad either. It also has some nice extras, including wireless connectivity and integrated CD and DVD label printing. It's not cheap, but it shows Epson can keep up with the competition when it wants.

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