Epson Stylus SX100 : Lethargic and Cheap
The entry level printer from Epson, Stylus SX100 was launched at the backdrop of increasing printing costs and was touted as an economical printer with superior print quality. It’s a multi-functional printer with individual cartridges and can copy and scan as well. Although the starting price of the printer when released was an excess of £60, it’s available today at under £30. Maybe its recession or maybe it’s a consumer catching exercise!
Text printing is good enough for homes and not-so-professional environments. Colour graphics is average with some banding observed across solid colours. Photo prints fared the best, with sharp, crisp photo outputs.
Epson claims that the printing speed of this printer is at 26ppm for black and 14ppm for colour. We are not sure where they caught hold of those numbers as the observed speed shows a mere fraction of the claimed speeds, at 2ppm for black and under 1ppm for colour. I wonder how much farther a company can go for marketing a product. The difference between claimed and observed printing speeds was a mind blowing 1300% and in reality, we have observed other companies inflate their printing speeds by as much as 50% but not like this super-bloated one.
One of Epson’s ploys during the release of this Epson inkjet printer was the economy card. It was found that the price of each monochrome print was around 3p and a colour print at 8p. These are not exactly inexpensive as one would have imagined it for. These prices have become the order of the day, any printer that clips your wallet more than these rates will be surrogated in the market very quickly.
Even though the printer comes at a throw-away price, the printing speed and the average printing costs will definitely not make this our favourite entry level printer. On the positive side, the SX100 is compact and the print quality is above average. Buy it if you are not exactly particular about the printing speeds.
About the author:
Abhinav has been blogging about printing and related technologies on CreativeCloud for several years. He is also a project manager for a large technology company.
