Epson's Stylus DX series of multifunction printers have got a new name: they're now known as the Stylus SX collection.

The revamped line has the same the strengths as Epson's earlier models, producing high quality, accurate office printing, with photo performance dominated by the manufacturer's RX line.

On this model, the SX205, Epson have put the emphasis on simplicity, with no LCD screen and only very basic functions.  It is a very well-connected printer, though, including a built-in card reader and a USB PictBridge interface for printing photos straight from a digital camera.

Printing Speeds

Epson claim speeds up to 34 pages per minute (ppm), which we found to be realistic when printing very light documents in draft mode. 

A more demanding test page saw the speed drop to 22 ppm.

In Standard mode, whether the print quality is noticeably better and definitely suitable for regular office use, the speed was only 7 ppm for both color and black and white printing.

This is a perfectly acceptable score, which is perhaps a little faster than some of the competition.

Producing a single 4 x 6'' photo takes 1 minute 10 seconds, which is slower than the average but once again more than reasonable for an entry-level model at this price.

One problem, though, is that printing on the SX205 is very noisy.  We cannot recommend highly enough turning on silent mode.  You'll have to wait a little longer for your documents, but your ears will thank you for it!

Quality

The SX205 produces good quality office documents, with sharp characters in black and white and lively colors. Draft mode, though, while fast, is such poor quality that it is only suitable for checking the layout of a document.


Indeed, office printing is very much this printer's strong point and its results on our photography tests left a lot to be desired.

It seems that yet another manufacturer has released a jack of all trades without sufficient attention to detail in all modes. 

On photos, individual ink drops are still very visible, even if the tones they produce are reasonably even.  For black and white photos, grays show a dominance of red.

Cartridges

Four separate cartridges are available for the SX205, which will save you money because you'll only need to replace the empty cartridges.

As with other printers whose print heads are built in to the printer, rather than the cartridge, this is a printer better suited to frequent use as the cleaning cycle that's required after a period of inactivity uses a lot of ink.

Cartridge	Lifespan (pages)
T0711 (black)	245
T0712 (cyan)	375
T0713 (magenta)	270
T0714 (yellow)	405