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Epson made its most recent foray into the multifunction device market in the second half of last year with the launch of the CX3200. In terms of appearance, there is little to distinguish the CX3200 from its big brother, the CX5200, which offers print, scan and copy functions.
Both are clad in the same two-tone grey casing with an LCD display and split-body design that allows you to lift the upper section housing the A4 flatbed scanner to access the print cartridges.
It is only once you get under the skin of the CX5200 that the differences between the two models become apparent.
Unlike the CX3200, there are four separate ink cartridges lurking inside the CX5200, which means you won't waste money replacing an entire cartridge just because one ink colour has run out.
The inks themselves also differ from those used in the CX3200, as the newer model uses Epson's Durabrite inks.
These are guaranteed to be fade resistant for up to 70 years and, more usefully on a day-to-day basis, are water and smudge-proof. To test this out, we liberally doused some of our printouts from the CX5200 with water and the inks did indeed stay put.
Meanwhile, the improved printer driver gives you on-screen information about the level of ink in each of the four cartridges, so you can substitute a cartridge that is running low for a full cartridge before you start a large print run, and then swap them back later.
The on-screen interface is easy to navigate and offers a range of one-click functions including scan to optical character recognition (OCR).
The specification of the scanner is an improvement on that of the CX3200: the new model scans at a maximum optical resolution of 1,200 x 2,400, rather than 600 x 1,200.
It is worth noting, though, that, while it is capable of scanning at 48bit colour depth, the output of the scanner will still be only 28bit.
Scan quality was impressive. Colours were faithfully captured and scanned black text was crisp against a white background.
Some slight graininess was noticeable in the images on a page of text and colour photos scanned at 1,200dpi, but this may have been down to the porous paper quality of our scanned original.
The scanner's CCD sensor also coped well with greyscale graduations in our test scan, differentiating well between similar tones even at the extreme highlight and shadow ends of the scale.
Epson claims 22 pages per minute (ppm) mono text print speeds for this model - up from the CX3200's claimed 14ppm.
Our printer tests, however, showed little real improvement on the speeds achieved by the earlier model, with the CX5200 printing our standard 10-page text document at a rate of 6ppm.
Our 10-page pdf document printed at 3ppm, while the 10-page mixed-content document rated 4ppm and the test photo took a lengthy seven minutes, 24 seconds.
Like all Epson inkjets, the CX5200 uses Epson's proprietary Piezo variable-sized ink droplet technology, which modifies the size of the ink droplets transferred to the page to enhance image quality and minimise graininess.
We were a little disappointed, therefore, that the quality of our test photo printout was not up to the standard produced by previous Epson review units.
Even when printing on Epson premium photo-quality paper, areas of solid colour on our test photo - most noticeably areas of sky - were slightly grainy, and there was obvious banding on the petals of red tulips. Overall, the image lacked vibrancy and looked rather flat.
On a more positive note, the output from our pdf was good. Characters were generally well-rendered and even text at 6pt printed across coloured icons was crisp and clean.
Characters from 100pt to 4pt on our character test page were clearly legible, although there was some noticeable feathering around the edges of characters at larger point sizes.
The colour copies we produced from the unit's copier at default settings were generally of a high quality. Colours were a little washed out, but the output quality was still superior to anything you'd achieve using a regular colour office photocopier.
With a price tag under £200 and some good features, the CX5200 offers good value for money and decent-quality output, although not at breakneck speeds.
Contact: Epson 0800 220 546
www.epson.co.uk
Specifications:
- 5,760dpi optimised print resolution, 1,200 x 2,400dpi 48bit scanning
- Inkjet printing/CCD scanning
- 9kg
- 453 x 434 x 254mm (w x d x h)
- Compatible with Windows 98 upwards and Mac OS 8.6 or higher
- USB
See also:
All Inkjet Printers
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