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Recent additions to Epson’s Expression Home range of inkjet all-in-one printers have been cheap and cheerful by nature, but the Epson Expression Home XP-212 really works hard to keep your buying costs low. It’s not much to look at, but under the surface it has a lot to offer.
As well as its awkwardly recessed USB port, the MFP has built-in Wi-Fi and supports Epson’s iPrint apps for Android and iOS, making it easy to print whatever you need from popular mobile devices as well as desktop computers. The lack of a screen on an MFP with standalone printing and copying features does throw up a few limitations, though.
With just one mono and one colour copy button, making multiple photocopies is a lot trickier than with MFPs that have a screen. The XP-212 has a tiny rear paper tray, too, capable of holding just 50 sheets of standard A4 printer paper, but we were pleased to find that it uses four individual ink cartridges, rather than a tri-colour cartridge system of the kind often used in budget printers and MFPs.
While the cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges use dye-based ink for optimal photo printing performance, the black ink cartridge is filled with pigment-based ink, designed to produce sharp text that doesn’t bleed. Even if you buy high yield ink cartridges, print costs are rather high at 11.5p per page of mixed black and colour, while a mono page is a somewhat more reasonable 3p.
When it comes to the MFP’s core features, it’s fairly well specified, if slightly slow. Epson uses the realistic ipm (images per minute) standard in its quoted speeds and lists the all-in-one as having a mono print speed of 6.2ipm and a colour speed of 3.1ipm. Using our test documents, we saw speeds of 6ppm for a mono print job and a sluggish 1.6ppm for an admittedly challenging set of heavily illustrated colour documents.
Epson Expression Home XP-212 Print Quality
It might be slow, but the XP-212 is rather good and handling brightly coloured illustrations and charts. Some dark areas showed marks left by the print head, but in generally we were pleased by its sharp, vivid reproduction of our graphical document. Unfortunately, its reproduction of text in the same document, particularly at small sizes, left something to be desired. 8pt serif text was legible, which is the critical point, but lettering was visibly jagged. Fortunately, this improves when it comes to larger point sizes and sans serif text.
The 12pt text of our mono letter looks as we’d expect from a budget inkjet. There are some flaws visible upon close examination, but nothing that makes it any way jarring or uncomfortable to read. You’ll want to avoid draft mode, though. It is admittedly very fast at 14.9ppm, but we can think of few situations in which most people would want to put up with the very pale with several white lines running through each letter.
Where the XP-212 excels in comparison to most budget MFPs is in its photo printing. While its prints aren’t flawless, they are very good indeed, with particularly good reproduction of delicately shaded areas and dark low-contrast images. Red tones are slightly over-saturated, which can make many skin tones look a little flushed, but we’re very impressed with the printer engine’s overall photo quality. Our prints took quite a while to emerge, though, with a pair of 10×8 photos printing in twelve minutes, 37 seconds, while a set of six 6x4in prints took the better part of 23 minutes.
Epson Expression Home XP-212 Scanner
The MFP’s scanner is the 1,200×2,400dpi CIS affair of the sort that you’ll find in many budget Epson all-in-ones. It’s rather slow, but its quality is better than that of many similarly priced rivals. Both our preview scan and 150dpi scan took 14 seconds, while a 300dpi document scan took 33 seconds. A 600dpi photo scan took 35 seconds, but raising the quality to 1,200dpi took it up to two minutes and 15 seconds.
Scan quality is among the best we’ve seen from an MFP in this price range, and the well-designed interface provides great control over your scanned images. There was plenty of contrast visible between a range of close grey tones, and fine detail was captured precisely. Areas of subtle shading, such as the tones of a summer sky, were accurately reproduced with smooth gradation, rather that sudden leaps from one colour to an entirely different tone. A 150dpi text scan was easy to read at 100 per cent magnification, but if you need to zoom in and crop areas, we suggest scanning text at 300dpi.
Copy quality is fair, with good contrast and images and reasonably sharp text at even 8pt, but with a slight red tint on images in our colour copy test. Colour copies were also particularly slow, at 47 seconds, while mono copies came out in a more reasonable 17 seconds. This all-in-one’s print and scan quality are good, and it’s very cheap to buy, but only a few pounds more will buy you the faster Epson XP-312.
