Labs

The EPL-6200 is one of this month's pricier offerings, which is unfortunate, as it's a pretty middle-of-the-road printer. That's not to say it's bad, just undistinguished. In our speed tests, for example, it averaged 19 pages per minute, while the Lexmark managed 26. It was slow to start up, too, taking 23 seconds to wake up from sleep before it would even get to work on the first page.

It's not a particularly attractive machine, either. The whole thing looks and feels cheap and plasticky, and, thanks to the way the paper tray sticks out of the front, it's quite an obtrusive presence on

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your desk. Perhaps in a misguided attempt to make it seem less bulky, Epson have made the tray the smallest one here, holding just 126 A4 sheets. Several competing printers take nearly double that.

Print quality didn't excite us. Text was perfectly clear and legible, but graphics came out dark and murky, making anything with images rather unpleasant to look at.

Considering the EPL-6200's price, it's also disappointingly short on distinctive features. A wide range of add-ons (including networking and a duplexer) are available if you choose to pay for them, which some users will appreciate, and you get an onsite warranty, which is very welcome. Most other manufacturers expect you to send your printer back to base in the event of trouble.

The Epson can be cost-effective to run if you use it heavily: a 6000 page cartridge works out at just 1.25p per page, the lowest cost of any printer here, but that's a £75 investment. The alternative 3000 page cartridges come out at 1.95p per page, which is, once again, no better than average.

In all, there's nothing terribly wrong with the Epson, but nor is there anything to justify the relatively steep price.