Epson Expression Home XP-4100
A compact and affordable MFP that packs in more features than you’d expect, but printing costs run high
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PRICE £60 (£72 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
This affordable little MFP is frill-free, but we’re still flabbergasted that Epson has crammed so much into such a small box: its footprint is barely larger than the A4 scanner that sits on the top. Its features are hidden under flaps that unfold to reveal its functions, such as the paper tray at the back, the tilt-out control panel and the (slightly flimsy) paper output tray that slides out from the front. It can even do some fancy tricks that pricier printers can’t, such as print on both sides of a sheet.
The printer uses four cartridges, which is a better option than the HP Envy Pro 6432 and its inefficient method of combining comb three colours in a single cartridge. cartridge
However, the c cost of printing (5.2p p per page for black, 12.8p for colour) quickly quic ramps up.
Those prices apply if you travel trav down the road of o buying your ow own ink cartridges, which is why the Epson
Expression Hom Home
XP-4100 is a prime contender for Epson’s cartridge subscription ( see p87) – we wouldn’t consider this printer without it. It should bring the cost of printing down to 3.3p to 4.3p per page, depending on how much you print. Ideally you should print close to your contract’s target page number, but even if you’re a bit out it should still work out cheaper than buying cartridges yourself.
Don’t expect stunning prints in standard mode – we saw faint lines across almost everything. It clearly wasn’t a problem with the printhead alignment, though, because printing in high quality mode eliminated it.
As well as eliminating these lines, the high quality setting also produced good-looking photo prints. The four-colour cartridge system can’t compete with the prints produced on the Canon Pixma TS8350, but they compared well with the two pricier HP inkjets.
We didn’t expect to see a printer of this price top any of the performance charts, but Epson knows how to get a single page into the output tray at top speed, and this printer equaled the Epson ET-2750’s speed record of ten seconds. It surprised us by producing copies at speed too, managing a mono copy in 13 seconds; this makes it joint second fastest.
If you’re short on space, the XP-4100 is an attractive buy, but note its shortcomings before you do.