If you are planning to buy a new printer in 2016 one brand you should certainly consider is Epson. Of course the first thing to consider when buying a new printer is whether the printer is what you require and how much can you afford to spend. The printer will have to do what you want it to do. In other words, is it for occasional home use, for a busy household with school attending children or is it for the office? If it is for the busy home user where more than one person is using the printer then it’s likely that an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier will be the best bet. Epson produce this printer and label it as a small-in-one compact printer and the latest batch of Epson Expression printers are the best sellers to date. This range of printer uses four ink cartridges, T1811 black, T1812 cyan, T1813 magenta and T1814 yellow. The beauty of the four-cartridge system is that you can replace the ink cartridges individually as they run out and not a full set of inks as was the case in other printers.
For example if we choose the Epson XP-412 as a typical all-in-one we can examine its key features. This printer has wireless printing, a colour LCD touch panel is very compact an environmentally has a small carbon footprint. The need to reduce the overall size of printers is to make the printer less of an obstacle on a desk and the size of the printer has no bearing on the performance of this excellent home printer. This neat and stylish black gloss printer houses it’s flatbed scanner under a textured lid with a typical gravity fed vertical Epson paper feed. On the bottom left there is an input for SD or memory Card sticks but unfortunately not a USB socket. A useful feature of this printer is that it supports wi-fi Direct and Airprint.
Access to the ink cartridges is under the scanner section and with the touch panel on the front it is easy to access them to insert replacement cartridges. The print speeds run approximately at almost 9 pages per minute for black and 4.5 pages per minute for colour. However, printing in draft mode will increase your pages per minute by one.
For general purpose every day printing the Epson XP-412 is perfect and compares favourably with it’s HP and Canon rivals. The over-riding factor with this print is the cost of running this printer with compatible ink cartridges. The non-original version of these printer cartridges are available online for as little as €1 each + VAT. Overall Epson’s XP-412 printer is a neat and well-designed printer that will print from most mobile devices and is definitely worth putting on your short list.