Epson Expression Premium XP-900

PRICEY LITTLE PERFORMER.

EPSON HAS DONE an excellent job of keeping the XP-900 as sleek as possible. Measuring only 14.8cm high (less than half the height of the plus-sized HP 8740), it doesn’t take up too much vertical space, which means you can tuck it away on top of a bookcase or hutch, or even on top of a set of drawers under the desk.

But getting it this compact means you’ll frequently have to move things around to get things done. The tilting screen panel, for instance, needs to be pulled up to its horizontal orientation before you can pull out the output tray. Similarly, you can’t pull out the output tray without pulling out the paper tray first (although you can push the latter back in once that’s done).

The XP-900 performs reasonably well for a stay-at-home MFC, printing 5 pages per minute for black and 3.5 pages per minute for colour. Where it really shows its family-friendly chops is when printing photos. It produces borderless 6 x 4-inch prints in 30 seconds flat, and the quality rivals that of dedicated photo printers, with silkysmooth colour reproduction and inky blacks. But you’ll pay for the privilege of using this printer, with running costs working out to be an expensive 30c per page.

The XP-900 is one of the older models on test, and this is evident through its non-touch LCD panel and restricted cloud functionality. While you can scan to various services using the built-in Wi-Fi — namely, Evernote, Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive — you have to set these all up through a desktop web browser. Nor can you print files from the supported cloud services.