Epson Stylus Photo PX820FWD

This inkjet printer is part of Epson's Stylus Photo range of multifunction inkjets, and is aimed at people who like printing photos. It promises better quality prints than having them developed professionally, faster results, lower running costs and a very easy to use interface. How much of that is true?

Hardware: touchscreen!

On a printer this expensive, Epson can't afford to cut any corners. Its four-in-once can scan, copy, fax and print on both sides of the page over Wi-Fi or your home network. The whole thing is controlled by a large 8'' touchscreen, which is comfortable and intuitive to use and substantially slims the printer down. To keep the manufacturer's promises about the quality of photo prints, it has six separate ink cartridges.

Speeds: fast

Epson certainly delivers on speed, with 12 pages per minute in both colour and black and white using our test documents. That's not quite the 40 ppm promised by the manufacturer, but that figure isn't based on ISO standardds. Nevertheless, the results are pretty good, especially compared to a model like the HP Premimum e-ALL-IN-ONE C310.

Unusually, the speeds are maintained when you're printing in double-sided mode, but the paper gets stuck a lot. We had to run our tests several times before we could time how long it would take to print a document without the paper getting jammed once.


Quality: photos are better

Unlike the Canon MG6150, which manages to maintain the same standards of quality for both office printing and photos, the Epson PX820FWD does a less refined job of office documents. Our test document came out looking sharp but the colours were faded, some of the letters were blurry and the ink drops were clearly visible in blocks of colour. That's only worth three stars.

Compare the Epson Stylus Photo PX820FWD in our Product Face-Off

On the other hand, the quality of colour photos really deserves five stars. The results really are as impressive as photos you have developed professionally. Colours are reproduced accurately, photos are sharp and with lots of contrast and every detail is picked out. Black and white photos aren't quite as good as colour prints, with a green tinge that affects some shades and a few missing details. The shape of the boy's face and the hair are just two of the problems you can spot in the face-off.

Scanner & Copier

Our results in this section are just about reasonable for a modern printer: 11 seconds to make a pre-scan, 7 seconds to do the full job at 75 dpi and 7 seconds for 300 dpi.

The scanner's native resolution of 4800 dpi and the quality speaks for itself. Although the digital versions of documents could be a little sharper, the contrast and the amount of detail are both up to scratch, despite a fairly high discrepancy of around 7%.

Copies arrive quickly: 12 seconds in black and white and 23 s in colour. The printing quality leaves a lot to be desired though: our black and white graphic suffered a lot, with all the contrast disappearing and text that came out so blurry it was illegible. You're better off sticking to copying text documents only.
Energy Consumption & Noise Levels

This printer needs 4.3 W while on standby, and 21 W while working. That's about average energy consumption for a printer, although we should point out that we usually prefer our printers fall under the 1 W threshold.

Noise levels climb to 48 dB(A), and the printer generally remains pretty quiet when working on both photos and documents, which is good news. Cost per page: 6.6 p

Two different sizes of cartridge are available, standard and extra large. We strongly recommend the latter. The six individual colours can be replaced individually. Based on replacing all six at once with XL cartridges, the total cost per page comes to 6.6 p, which is below our average.

ISO Lifespan