Labs

Epson's Stylus DX8400 looks a lot like the less expensive DX4400, with a navy blue lid that neatly conceals the scanner bed, but its left-hand top panel offers far more controls. Besides a full set of buttons to control direct printing and copying, there's also a tilting LCD colour screen. Other additional features compared to the 4400 include a PictBridge USB port and memory card slots. The 8400 can make up to 99 colour or mono copies at the press of a button, but although our mono copies came out well, yellow shades were far too intense in colour copies.

General print quality proved very similar

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to the 4400. Draft speeds were among the fastest in the group, but our mono text document was barely legible, with pale, broken characters. Output at normal quality was more presentable, but the Epson took nearly two and a half minutes to print just ten pages of mono text, and mixed colour prints took over three and half. Colours were rather dark, but overall print quality was clear.

Photos fared better, with bright, well-balanced colours, although we noticed a slight grain on our picture of a clear blue sky, also visible on palebackgrounds. Unfortunately, our photo prints progressed particularly slowly, with a batch of six taking more than 20 minutes.

The scanner interface is easy to use, yet offers plenty of advanced controls which allowed us to tweak every detail of our colour settings. However, while our images looked sharp, colours weren't as accurate as those from many of the other devices in the group, and scanning was rather slow.

These gripes about print speed and quality didn't completely put us off the 8400, but its running costs did: a mixed colour page works out at 11.2 pence, well over twice what you'd pay with the most cost-effective models on test.