Epson Expression Home XP-400 Small-in-One Printer

The Epson Expression Home XP-400 Small-in-One ($99 list) is essentially an upgrade to the Epson Stylus NX430 Small-in-One ($99 direct, 3.5 stars), the first of Epson's multifunction printers (MFPs) to bear the Small-in-One moniker. It retains its highly compact form factor while showing improved speed.

The XP-400's defining characteristic is its diminutive frame; it measures 5.4 by 15.4 by 11.8 inches (HWD) when closed and weighs just 9 pounds. The glossy black XP-400 has a top-loading paper feeder that fits 100 sheets. Although it lacks an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper, it offers guidance for manual duplexing through the printer driver. The printer employs four individual ink tanks.

The XP-400 prints, copies, and scans. The tilt-up control panel houses a 2.5-inch LCD screen. The Home screen shows various labeled icons, which you can access with a 4-way controller: Setup; Help; WiFi Setup; Copy; Print Photos; Scan; and More Functions (under which are Copy/Restore Photos; Photo Layout Sheet; and Slide Show). The flatbed scanner can scan or copy at up to letter size, and lacks an automatic document feeder (ADF). A memory-card reader accepts cards in the SD/MSpro families.

The XP-400 connects to a computer via USB, or to a network by 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. I tested it over a USB connection with a PC running Windows Vista.

Speed

It was good to see the XP-400 print out our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software) at a respectable 3.1 effective pages per minute (ppm), as the Epson Stylus NX430 Small-in-One's 1.7 ppm had been notably slow even for a budget inkjet when I tested it last October. In general we've seen an uptick in inkjet speeds over the past year, but even so, this was a nice jump, putting it in the middle of the pack for its price point. The Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J430W ?($99 direct, 4 stars) zipped through the same tests at 4.3 ppm, while the Editors' Choice Kodak ESP 3.2 All-in-One Printer ($99.99 direct, 4 stars) output our tests at a 3.2 ppm clip.

The XP-400's average of 2 minutes 18 seconds to print out a 4-by-6 photo was an improvement over the NX430's 2:55 average, although still slow; the Kodak ESP 3.2's average of 50 seconds per print leaves them, as well as the Brother MFC-J430W?which averaged 1:55 per print?in the dust.

Output Quality
The XP-400's text quality was slightly below par for an inkjet, fine for most home, school, or business correspondence but not for resumes or other documents with which you want to create a good visual impression.

Graphics quality was par for an inkjet good enough for any internal business, home, or school use. Depending on how picky you are, you might even consider the graphics good enough to hand to important clients or customers who you want to impress with a sense of your professionalism.

Photo quality was typical an inkjet. For the most part, colors looked reasonably true, though prints tended to be on the light side, with some detail lost in brighter areas. A monochrome photo showed a distinct tint. Quality was about what you'd expect from prints from a drugstore.

The XP-400 is sharply geared to home use, lacking features that would make it attractive for even light-duty home-office use. Its paper capacity is at the low end of the acceptable range, and it lacks fax capabilities, an automatic document feeder (ADF), an auto-duplexer, and a port for a USB thumb drive, to name a few.

Epson doesn?t quote cost-per-page figures for its printers, but based on the price and yield figures of their most cost-effective cartridges, the running costs work out to 6 cents per monochrome page and 16.7 cents per color page. Both are high compared with the more economical models; the Kodak ESP 3.2's running costs are 3 cents per monochrome page and 9.5 cents per color page, and the Brother MFC-J430W's are 3.8 and 11.3 cents, respectively.

The Epson Expression Home XP-400 Small-in-One is a fairly typical budget home MFP, with fairly average speed, graphics and photo quality, and feature set, and with a relatively high cost per page. Its compactness is the one thing that sets it apart. The Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J430W is significantly faster in printing out documents, while the Editors' Choice Kodak ESP 3.2 has better overall output quality and photo-printing speed. But neither can fit in as tight a space as the XP-400.?

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