Epson Stylus DX4400 All-in-One printer review

Author Simon Williams

The Stylus DX4400 is conventionally styled, but unconventionally coloured in slate grey. With a straight-through paper path from back to front and a fold-down, telescopic output tray, there’s nothing unusual about the physical style, either. According to Epson, the input tray can hold up to 80 sheets of 60gsm paper, but who uses 60gsm paper on a standard basis? We managed to load 80 sheets of standard 80gsm office paper.

The spec sheet for this printer claims print speeds of 25ppm for black print and 13ppm for colour, but even in draft mode these speeds are way off what you are likely to see in real life. Our five-page text print took 2 minutes 9 seconds to total, giving a speed of 2.3ppm and the black text and colour graphics print, also five pages, took a fairly exceptional 6:09, just .81ppm. Both these speeds are singularly unimpressive, with the colour print being 1 of the slowest we’ve observed.

The output quality is not too poor given the cost of the printer but black characters still come out a lot more jagged than most of the DX440′s rivals. Solid colours are dense with good registration and small bleed of black text over coloured backgrounds. Variegated colour is also quite reasonable for this class of machine.

An A4 copy came out very a bit paler than the original but colours were still solid even although they had been lighter. Our photographic print, on Epson’s Premium Glossy photo paper, reproduced nicely with smooth gradations of colour and fine detail in the foreground. Colours were generally natural, though quite a bit of detail was lost in shadowed areas.

Epson printers have never been recognized for their quietness. Although printing itself is only a small noisier than its principal competitors, the Stylus DX4400 rattles away when feeding paper, giving a peak noise reading of 70dBA. This is genuinely really loud and noisier than most printers, of any technology type, we’ve tested before.

This is a four-colour printer utilizing 4 separate cartridges. You can replace them individually as they run out and this gives good print economy. The cheapest way to get cartridges is in a 4 pack, which sells for around £13.68, giving page expenses of 2.22p for black and four.85p for colour pages.

These expenses are really competitive, even with printers costing considerably far more, and are fairly a lot best-in-class compared with the entry-level all-in-ones we’ve tested lately.

Verdict

The Stylus DX4400 is a mixed bag. Epson has managed to create a good-looking, functional all-in-one at a extremely competitive cost, while still offering individual ink cartridges and low running expenses. Print good quality is also reasonable and the printer handles photo printing surprisingly well for a machine not geared particularly to photos.

Where it misses out is on print speed and noise level. It takes a lengthy time to create a page and could by no means be described as quiet thanks to Epson’s trademark paper feed mechanism.

Printers reviews