Epson DX7400 Review - Multifunction on a budget
Sunday, December 02, 2007
There is a massive choice of multifunction (MF) printers on the market. Some try to do all things great (and fail) and charge a high price tag, others try to do too much and end up just a big disappointment. Epson have been making MF printers for a long time now, and their Stylus DX7400 offers a really good specification on paper, without a high price tag. A little shopping around can bag you the DX7400 for just £48, which gets you an inkjet printer, a scanner, a copier, and the ability to print direct from Pictbridge digital cameras. The only thing it lacks that more (much more) expensive offerings have is a fax machine, but in the age of the email, who uses a fax machine nowadays anyway?!The DX7400 uses a four colour print system, with separate ink cartridges for cyan, magenta, yellow and black. This is great, as you only need to replace one empty cartridge at a time, with no wasted ink. This is only going to cost you around £6 per cartridge, so it is very cheap to keep this printer running. Many photo dedicated printers use six or more ink colours, to give you better tonal range, but to my surprise the photos from the DX7400 printed out very quickly and were great quality. When printing on normal inkjet paper (rather than glossy), large areas of flat colour did show some banding, but with careful use this could be avoided. For general full colour prints, like office documents, diagrams etc, not only were all the colours bright and vivid, with nice crisp text, but pages shot out at a great speed. Epson quote up to 32 pages per minute (ppm), in my experience I was getting an average of around 22ppm.
The fact that you also have a scanner bed on the DX7400 is a real boon. It might not sound much, but you will be surprised at how much you use the 'Copy' facility. Just pop your original on the glass, and push either the black copy of colour copy button. I tried some pages of text, which gave me nice crisp copies, with a white background, at around 22ppm. A full colour magazine page was slightly slower and did put quite a lot of ink of the page, things ended up a bit soggy. I changed over to some higher quality matte inkjet paper (100gsm) and then tried the magazine copy again. This time around things were hunky dory. A really nice copy, with good accurate colour reproduction.
Scanning is very simple. You can use Epson's own Scan Assistant software, which offers three different levels of scanning, from an auto-mode, through to a home mode, or a professional mode where you can control more or less every aspect of the scan. The DX7400 is also fully twain compliant, so you can scan from within your fave application (eg. PhotoShop). The scans were great, very fast to preview, and a pretty resectable speed for the final scan. Text was great, photos were very accurate, the only caveat was black and white photos which had a slight green tinge. This was easily corrected, so not really worth worrying about.
To say I was impressed with the Epson Stylus DX7400 is an understatement. The software included is easy to install, it even includes a version ABBYY FineReader for optical character recognition. The rest of the Epson suite of software really allows you to use all of the features easily and effectively. The printout quality is really good, for this price bracket it is hard to fault. Add to this the invaluable copy feature, then on top of that a really good scanner and you are onto a winner. If I had been told that the DX7400 was £99, I would still have to recommend it, but for half this price, it is a real bargain.
Product: Epson Stylus DX7400
Price: £44 (Amazon)
Supplied by: Epson UK
Contact: +44 (0)8702 416900
Labels: Mac Peripherals, PC Peripherals, Review
4 Comments:
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At 8:14 pm,
said...
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I've had a DX7400 for almost 6 months. It has been a lot of trouble. Apart from drinking ink like there's no tomorrow, it reports cartridges empty when they have almost had no use. For example, printing black text pages with just a line of colour to highlight headings - about three words a page - made all the colour cartridge levels fall dramatically (even though the headings were BLUE - like after about 150 A4 text pages - had to replace all cartridges. Now it is printing with bands - like every inch, there is a ½" almost unprinted band making the pages unusable. Have mailed Epson support about all this. Nozzle checks show all is fine and from start of a printing session, can get 15 pages OK before the banding kicks in. Problem is, try a couple of cleans "in case" and yes - more new cartridges required. In addition, blobs of ink appear across at different positions. I can honestly say it is the worst printer I have ever owned. Have tried all the suggestions on Epson support area without any success - now awaiting their reply but somehow doubt if it will do any good. Perhaps they will acknowledge it is a faulty unit and replace same. Inside the sealed scanner area is a piece of blue and white paper floating about that seems impossible to remove. So much for quality control. Sorry but that's my feedback report.
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At 2:21 pm,
said...
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I agree with Zone 8. I havent had this printer long neither and I have found out that it consumes lots of ink. Not only that but when you run out coloured ink cartridge you can't just replace the black. You have to replace the whole thing which is very costly! Its ridiculous also because you can buy the ink cartridges separately yet you have to replace the whole of it if you want it to work. If you ask me its very misleading and I'd recommend you do not invest in this product as its just expensive and not worth the buy! I have taken it back to where i purchased it (comet) however they just palmed me off saying I would have to return it to an address where they repair these printers. I feel its not worth the hassle as it wont change the make up of the printer!
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At 6:50 pm,
said...
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I agree this printer is absolute rubbish. It has just cost me over £40 to replace all the cartridges, and it still will not print, despite cleaning heads and nozzle checks. Apart from that, most of the on screen instructions are in German. Some help that is! Never again will I buy Epson.
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At 2:05 pm,
said...
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I have had the epson dx7400 for almost two years now and I am thoroughly satisfied with it.
Initially, of course, it does drink the ink but this is explained in the manual that the first load will be used up quickly. After that the ink usage is quite reasonable, but as with any printer one must be prudent with its use. Printing off test copies willy-nilly will use up the ink very quickly.
The installatin disc gives language options so their should be no difficulty getting instructions in English.
As for its capatibilty with other programmes, one word: fabulous. I use it regularly to scan old photos and other documents, in conjunction with Photoshop Elements, Photoshop cs2, Serif 9 and ABBY Finereader pro: the results have been amazing.
The ink cartridges can all be replaced individually, they do not all have to replaced in order to replace the black.
Finally, as for the cost of the cartridges, you will find that by shopping around the multipack can be bought quite reasonably. I would spend about €50 every 2 months at worst.
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Dave
Dave has been in the graphic design industry for 14 years. Long time reviewer of technology related products, he is Owner/Editor of Geekanoids.
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