Epson Stylus Office BX625FWD review

Canon’s Pixma MG6150 remains the best all-in-one inkjet we’ve seen, but Epson hopes to woo the small-business buyer by adding a number of office features. And it does indeed offer some advantages over the Canon. For starters, there’s a fax machine, and if you need to make copies of batches of pages, the automatic document feeder will come in extremely handy; it’s capable of holding 30 pages at a time.

We prefer the 250-sheet input tray, which holds 100 pages more than the Canon, and running costs are lower too. Epson’s high-capacity inks yield 945 and 600 to 1,005 pages for mono and colour, which works out at 1.6p and 7p per page, compared to 2.9p and 8p for the Canon.

The BX625FWD’s print, scan, fax and copy functions are augmented by automatic duplexing, and connectivity is provided by 802.11bgn wireless, 10/100 Ethernet and USB, plus a host USB port and card reader for direct printing. There’s even a film scanner alongside the A4 platen.

That’s where the good news begins to fade, however. The control panel is dominated by a 6.3cm colour screen, which isn’t particularly easy to read, and is packed with obscurely labelled buttons – in stark contrast to the Pixma’s clear, task-based labels.

And the Epson proved disappointing in our print tests. Mono text was fine, albeit slightly spidery on closer inspection, and accompanying graphics were grainy and pixelated. Draft mode wasn’t great, either: text looks like it was printed by a dot-matrix in the early 1990s rather than an inkjet in 2010.

Photos were also disappointing, with colours washed out by a slight orange tint, and our test prints were afflicted with banding and a lack of sharp detail. The Epson’s various print problems are exacerbated by copying.

Print speed varied, too. The Epson churned through our mono pages at 15.2ppm – almost twice as fast as the Canon – but its speed plummeted when confronted with more complicated tasks, producing our ISO colour document at just 1.6ppm and taking more than two minutes to produce a 6 x 4in photograph. The only area where the Epson beats Canon is scan quality, with more accurate colours that make photos in particular look much more pleasing.

If print quality is your priority, then, the Canon is the clear winner. However, for the same price Epson provides a printer with more office-friendly capabilities and a slightly superior scanner.