Labs

Epson's Stylus DX8400 is the cheapest printer with a full-colour screen in the group, and this welcome addition makes tasks such as copying easier. The printer is easy to set up, although a deeply recessed USB port made it hard to plug in the cable at first. Once you have installed the ink cartridges, the printer spends a few minutes initialising the ink system. Software installation took a surprisingly long time.

Like many Epson inkjets, the DX8400's draft print setting sacrifices readability for faster prints. Sadly, the

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balance is wrong here, and draft prints were virtually illegible. Characters were pale and so poorly formed that details such as the line across upper-case 'A's weren't even printed. Normal-quality prints were a great improvement, and while they weren't particularly fast to appear, the quality of the lettering was good enough for formal correspondence. Colour documents looked good and were produced quickly, with accurate colours and only slight graininess.

The DX8400 was the slowest MFP in the group for printing 6x4in photos. The colour on some prints looked dull and flat, particularly on pictures with a lot of brown and grey tones, but overall quality was good, with particularly intense reproduction of dark colours.

Epson's scanner interface is excellent, and its advanced controls were powerful and easy to use. The scanner has a maximum resolution of 1,200x2,400dpi. It produced sharp images, but colours weren't as accurate as those from Brother's cheaper DCP-135C, and 1,200dpi scans were slow. The quality of mono photocopies was good, but pale colours in our colour copy acquired a lurid yellow tone.