Epson Stylus SX400 All-in-One Printer

I got this printer for my Dad, his old Epson CX3200 all in one suffered a print head problem that was terminal, so got him the Epson SX400 as a replacement and as his Christmas gift.

Once the printer arrived I set it up for him without any problems.

The SX400 has a small colour LCD display, this will display photo's from flash cards inserted into the built in card reader, but the main function is to display the menu, this is fairly easy to navigate, you can change print output settings, paper type, maintenance functions ETC. You can perform basic photo editing within the printer such as red eye reduction and trimming of photos, so you can use the printer as a stand alone without a PC.

The scan/copy functions are easy to use with just the push of one button, colour or B&W, it a simple operation.

Now for the down side, this printer drinks ink, after just 3 weeks of ownership and light use my Dad has already had to replace the yellow cartridge due to an error message 'cannot recognize cartridge' NO low ink warning, i suspect the cartridge had run out of ink. I phoned Epson customer support when this error occurred only to be told that I should replace the ink cartridge, Epson refused to send a new one to replace the faulty one, they did give me a postal address to send the cartridge back to for them to test but without a guarantee of a replacement, and this is supposed to be customer service!! The magenta and cyan are also very low, on our local high street these cartridges cost a whopping £9.99 each. I know the cartridges that Epson supply are only half full, so when you first charge the print heads half the ink has already been used up, I find this ridiculous. You can get compatible cartridges for this printer at £12 a set.

This printer is noisy and slow, the advertised PPM is completely wrong, if you print a photo on highest quality then go and make yourself a cuppa, sit back and wait. Print output quality is not too bad for a 4 ink system, colours appear well defined and sharp with Epson paper, but if you use a cheap photo paper then the results will be disappointing, lacking in contrast and plain old dull.

The build quality is not that great, the cheap looking high gloss black design will show every scratch and attracts dust like steel to a magnet, it seems very flimsy, with the paper feed trays and scanner lid appearing to be very fragile and the LCD monitor is not too well fixed either, no good if you have kids around.

I have always owned Epson printers, currently an R360,R300 & Stylus 860,and other models that I have passed on, they have always been very reliable. But I am very concerned with the way that their products seem to be going downhill, and running costs getting higher, at one time of day you could get compatible cartridges for pennies but not anymore.

I paid £65 for this printer and to be honest would not want to pay anymore than that price, my Dad is happy with it, he prints cutting sheets on standard A4 paper most of the time and the printer is fine for that but start pushing this printer with A4 size photo's and that's when you will fined it's Achilles heal.

EDIT - This printer has since been returned to Amazon for a full refund, it constantly rejected GENUINE EPSON ink cartridges even when they were full, we worked out that this printer cost us around £38 to print just 20 photographs at high quality, a total failure of just what home printing should be, cheap and reliable, this printer was neither.

I brought this print to replace an existing epson printer. It is no where near as good. When people say it is noisy, it really is noisy!!! it only uses epson ink and refuses to recoginse any other brand. on my old epson you could take the top of for ease of scaning, not so with this one. all in all it is an inferior product to the DX4800 which it replaced. it does print and scan, arrived quickly and well packed. wouldn't buy it again.

I recently purchased one of these printers after having been told that the photo quality was excellent. This may well be the case but I will never be able to find out. I went throught the rather lengthy procedure of installing the printer and attempted to print out some sample documents from my files. The first two items were ok and the printing acceptable. When I went back to the printer a little later to try something else I got what was to become a very familiar message : 'document failed to print'. After trying various settings I uninstalled and re-installed the software and again everything was ok for a short while and then that dreaded message reappeared and nothing would work. In the end I re-installed at least a dozen times and even tried loading onto another computer - all with the same end result. A colleague of mine who is great with computers also tried and had to give up in the end. We went on the internet and found that this is a very common problem with this printer. I returned it and have replaced it with a HP Photosmart C4580. Early days but everything loaded first time and has so far worked impeccably. ALL I SAY TO YOU IS BE CAREFUL IF YOU BUY THE EPSON.