Epson’s  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.  This printer is  aimed at users who are  in to  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 6x4in, 7x5in 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 photographic 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. Normal text is a bit fuzzy around the edges but dark, legible and reasonably speedy at 8.1ppm. Colour documents printed at 5.5ppm – we used the printer’s standard Text quality setting to fulfill this speed. Colour illustrations looked a little pale  but good enough for general use  . This MFP is at its strongest though when printing photos – all our prints looked gorgeous, with bright, accurate colours , excellent contrast and no visible dithering in shaded areas. A 6x4in 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 6x4in 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, but some subtlety of colour and shading is lost . Colour copy quality is also a little inaccurate but we were happy with mono.

cartridges" href="http://www.firstinkjets.co.uk" target="_blank"> 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 merely usable , 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.