Epson Expression Home XP-5105
It’s smart and quick, but Epson’s XP-5105 is ultimately disappointing
SCORE PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk
Epson’s Expression Home XP-5105 is a compact inkjet MFP. At its core it’s virtually identical to the WF-2860DWF ( see p88), but here it’s tuned to home and photo use, with an SD memory slot on the front panel. There’s automatic duplex printing, and you can join it to a wireless network, but otherwise there’s nothing exciting about the specification. The XP-5105 is exclusive to the Dixons Carphone group – its sister model, the XP-5100, ships without bundled optical character recognition (OCR) software, but is otherwise identical.
Start using the XP-5105 and you will notice that it’s remarkably quiet, with high-resolution scans in particular being almost inaudible. Unfortunately, the next thing you’re likely to notice is a low ink warning, as the bundled setup cartridges have a miserly capacity. We completed our regular plain paper tests, comprising about 90 pages, but received a low-ink warning on starting our photo tests.
Two 10 x 8in photos, one borderless A4 print and two borderless 6 x 4in prints later, and the XP-5105 had run out of both cyan and magenta ink – joining a select club of fewer than ten box-fresh printers that couldn’t make it through our standard tests. This wouldn’t be so bad if replacement ink was cheap, but even calculated for the XL replacements, costs work out at a steep 13.4p per A4 page – of which the black component is a dizzying 4.8p.
That’s a shame, as in some ways the XP-5105 is promising. It flew through our black letter test at 16ppm and managed a strong 5.1ppm in our more complex colour graphics test. Photo prints seemed quick, too – those two 10 x 8in prints took only three minutes each. Print quality was generally good, although we noticed some subtle banding in colour fills on plain paper, while duplex graphics were noticeably fainter than regular ones. Typically for Epson, scan quality was very high, although scan speeds weren’t as quick as we would expect in this class – tested over Wi-Fi with a line-of-sight to the router, a 150dpi A4 scan needed 25 seconds.
Unfortunately, the details are all somewhat academic. With unremarkable specifications, stingy ink supplies and high running costs, the XP-5105 is hard to love, and despite some strengths it’s impossible to recommend.