Epson Premium XP-6000

SET ME UP BEFORE YOU PRINT-O.

ONCE YOU’VE PEELED away a dozen pieces of packing tape keeping the XP6000’s various trays in order, the printer needs about 10 minutes initial setup followed by another 10 minutes of alignment checks — and this is before you’ve connected it to Wi-Fi to actually start printing. It’s not a device for the impatient, but if you want professional quality documents, it’s the best in class here.

Five ink tanks nestle under the scanner bed, four for colour images and a dedicated black for docs. The black text results are faultless, producing crisp documents that are ideal for anything from recipes to forms, and does so at 5.5ppm in our test. However, photo results are a bit off, as we saw blue streaks on our test image, and the contrast could be better. There is an option to tweak the photos within the menu system and this does improve results, but it’s a disappointing that this doesn’t happen automatically.

Where it does win out is with the scanner, which can save to cloud services and external USB and SD memory cards — something that all printers should aspire to.

A single page scan takes 20 seconds, and a double takes 40 seconds, though you will have to manually set this up. The matte-black chassis repels fingerpints, which is great, as you’ll have to have your hands all over this pulling the paper input and output trays in and out.

If you prefer the definite click of a physical button when going through menus, this is the printer for you. Be warned, though, the screen is tiny, and the app is best described as only ‘functional’.