Epson CX16NF

This 4-in-1 colour laser multifunction printer is aimed mainly at the small business segment. The manufacturer is highlighting the pro quality of prints, the ultra-compact design and the low initial outlay and cost per page. What does it offer in practice?


Hardware:

Let's kick off with by looking at Epson's 'ultra-compact' claims: simply put, it isn't compact when you compare it to the Samsung ML-1630, a black & white multifunction. Not easy for the Epson to compete here as a certain amount of space is needed to build in the 4-in-1 options, as well as the four cartridges required for colour.

So what does this machine do? It prints, copies, scans and faxes, all with networking capability. You control it from a small 4-line screen (see below).

It doesn't do double-sided but the document loader (35 sheets) has been designed to house a double-sided kit as an optional extra. Otherwise you can pay £30 extra for the same model, the AcuLaser CX16DNF (D for Duplex), with the double-sided as an integrated feature.



Speeds

You get 20 pages per minute (ppm) for black & white. This is plenty for an SME. Colour speeds are quite a bit slower however (5 ppm). If print speeds are top of your list of priorities and you're willing to throw in a few hundred pounds extra, the Lexmark X544dn (21 ppm colour and 23 ppm black & white) is a good alternative.




Quality

The quality for office documents is good. Colours are accurate and the characters are clean and well defined. However, depending on how you're holding the printed document and the reflections on it, you can see irregularities in the surface which spoil the results (see photo below). This sort of thing is common on lasers and is due to how the toner is manufactured. We noted the same phenomenon on black and white documents and photos.

 

Although the office doc results are good, our test photo lacks brightness and the print head lines are too visible.



As a scanner and copier, the speeds and quality are average. You'll need 22 seconds to preview a document, 15 seconds to scan at 300 dpi. No war horse then. Nor is quality all that convincing as the image lacks definition and the details are blurry. At 8.3%, the colour difference is high.
Cost per page: 12.1 pence

Although cheap to buy the hardware, the cost per page (2.5 pence) is relatively high if we confine ourselves to black and white. If you need to do a lot of colour printing, you'll need to add in the cost of all four cartridges, which starts to mount up (12.1 pence per page for a laser is extortionate).

ISO lifespan for text