With it its low price and compact design the
Epson Stylus SX405 is the affordable solution for the home office environment.
It offers high quality printing, scanning and copying with direct PC-free
printing from its memory card slot and PictBridge connection. Although the
purchase price for the SX405 is affordable its Genuine Epson printer ink cartridges are not quite
so impressive. A set of Epson SX405 ink cartridges costs £30 from high street
retailers, which consists of four separate ink cartridges one for each of the
colours. Fortunately there are compatible Epson ink cartridges available for the
SX405 and not only do they cost half the price of the originals they also print
the same amount of pages. The SX405 produces good quality print output when it
comes to everyday documents and produces surprisingly good photo prints too
considering it only uses a four colour ink system. It's hard to believe that
the SX405 contains an A4 flatbed scanner when you it see it in the flesh
because its so compact, but it does and the scanner performs very well despite
its compact slimline design. The resulting scanned documents are very accurate
representations of the originals and produced with good speed. The photo copier
shares the same scanner for producing copies with a good balance of speed and
quality without the need for a PC to be present. The other PC-free function of
the SX405 is direct printing from a memory card or digital camera, where images
can be previewed on the built in LCD screen before printing. Strangely the best
quality setting is not selectable when printing directly which is somewhat of a
mystery. The SX405 is a overall a very versatile device and offers all of this
with a very affordable price tag.