Epson Expression Premium XP-510 review

Epson has built a good reputation for its budget inkjet all-in-one printers, and the Expression Premium XP-510 aims to maintain this, in an unobtrusive, small-footprint device. It’s aimed at the home and home-office market, and aims to be as good for photos as in plain paper printing.

Encased in a mixture of high-gloss and textured black plastic, the printer has a steeply angled control panel set in front of a simple flatbed scanner, without extending hinges to its lid. Its colour, LCD display is a mere 37mm, which makes menu text and status messages very small. Controls are minimal, too, but are enough to get the job done.

There’s a single, 100-sheet paper cassette – though no multipurpose feed – and the output tray pulls out neatly from inside. At the back is a single USB socket, but you’re better off taking advantage of the printer’s Wi-Fi connection, since it opens up more possibilities. The printer is Wi-Fi direct compatible and supports Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud print and Epson’s remote email printing, Epson Connect.

To print wirelessly from an Android device, you need to download Epson’s free app, and get it to hunt out the printer to make connection – there’s no NFC support to speed this up. We were also disappointed to find it lacks memory card slots.

The printer is rated at 9.5ppm in mono and 9ppm in colour, but in our tests it was a little slower than this: we measured 9.1ppm for mono print and 8.1ppm for colour. This makes the printer reasonably quick for an inkjet in its class, although the Canon Pixma MG6450 outpaces it.

A single-page copy took a fair 36 seconds, and a full A4 photo completed in 1min 10secs, which is impressive. Photo quality is good, too, and colours really leap off the page. Natural subjects show very plausible pastels, and graphics exhibit bold primaries well. Again, though, we prefer the output of Canon’s MG6450, which produces photos with a more natural colour balance and better detail in the shadows.

Some colour shades are a little dark in comparison to onscreen originals, but not by much. Skin tones look natural, and detail levels are well up to the mark. Greyscale images benefit from the extra photo black ink and look pleasingly neutral. The printer boasts a five-ink print engine, with separate tanks for each colour, and all five cartridges are easy to access, under the scanner.

Plain paper prints aren’t as satisfying as photos, however, and there are some jagged edges to characters and a little ink bleed. Colours are well reproduced, though, and satisfyingly bright where needed.

The ink cartridges are available in two capacities, both confusingly from the Polar Bear series (Epson uses birds and animals as well as type numbers to distinguish cartridges), but even using the XL versions, page costs come out at 2.7p for ISO mono pages and 11p for ISO colour.

The mono page cost is a touch higher than rivals by around 0.2-0.3p, but several pence higher per page when it comes to colour prints. Cartridge costs fluctuate regularly, however, so this difference may diminish over time. The XL cartridge capacities are in the 500-700 page range, so the cartridge won’t need to be replaced every week.

Epson’s Expression Premium XP-510 is a reasonable all-in-one, capable of excellent-quality photos. If this is an important part of your requirements, it’s a good reason for looking this way. However, below-par plain-paper output and a couple of other shortcomings – most notably the small size of its LCD screen and the relatively high colour-print cost – mean either the Canon Pixma MG5450 or the MG6450 are still the top dogs at around £100 to £120.

Related Posts

The Best Viber Stickers Reflect Your Expression How to Cancel Premium Channels on Prime Video How to Get CrunchyRoll Premium How to Upgrade to Spotify Premium Samsung Galaxy S7 Review: A Great Phone in its Day, but Don’t Buy One Private Internet Access Review Pluto TV Review—Is It Worth It? ExpressVPN Review – Unbiased and Tested In-House “Your Payment Requires Additional Review” in Zelle – What Does it Mean?