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The PX810FW is the newest A4  All-in-one  in Epson’s Photo Stylus range, with a memory card reader, touchscreen and full fax, print, scan and copy capabilities. It’s aimed at users who are serious about their home photo printing. The printer uses six Epson ink cartridges which are of the Claria variety, rather than the Durabrite used in other Epson all-in-ones. Unlike many A4 inkjets, high capacity ink cartridges are available in the form of Epson’s T079 Owl inks, which can lower your print costs to 7.5p from around 13p per mixed-colour page using the T080 Hummingbird inks. Another feature likely to endear the PX810FW to photographers is its dedicated photo tray for 6×4in, 7×5in or 16:9 paper.

 A large touch screen display and several touchpad buttons are all that is needed to scan, copy send faxes and do printing that does not involve the PC, i.e from a memory card or PicrBridge camera. Not the best looking machine in the world though.  .

 The printer can be connected via USB, 10/100 Ethernet or over a wireless network, however the latter was a little complicated to set up, but then again you only need to do it once.  .

Document printing isn’t outstanding but it’s better than that of some models in the same range . Draft text is pale but solid - and it’s quick too at 17.6ppm.  When changing to text in normal mode it was black although there was a little dithering particularly on bold print,  and reasonably speedy at 8.1ppm. Colour documents printed at 5.5ppm - we used the printer’s standard Text quality setting to attain this speed. Colour illustrations looked a little pale but quality was usable .  The PX810FW comes in to its own when it comes to photographs. Colours were bright and accurate, prints were superb  , excellent contrast and no visible dithering in shaded areas. A 6×4in print at the highest quality setting takes around one minute and 19 seconds, well worth the wait.

Epson’s scanner interface is  also very good  , with assorted modes making it easy to use whether you want to control every detail or just click and scan. Scan speeds are quick, too - a 600dpi 6×4in photo scan took just 13 seconds. However, the 4,800×4,800dpi scanner isn’t the best we’ve seen from Epson. It captures fine detail accurately,  however some of the subtleness is missing  . Colour copy quality is also a little inaccurate but we were happy with mono.

Cheap printer Ink cartridges for the epson stylus photo PX810FW are available, so the printer  costs surprisingly little to run but scan quality and plain paper prints are  not the best  , rather than outstanding. For £250, you could easily buy better stand-alone printers and scanners, or a more well-rounded photo MFP like Canon’s similarly priced Pixma MP990.

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