EPSON Expression Home XP-410 Series: the Small-in-One Printer (mini review)

THE PRODUCT

The EPSON Expression Home XP-410 Small-in-One All-in-One Printer, $69.99.

THE GOOD

I really, really like the footprint of this EPSON printer. They aren’t just dishing out marketing speak by calling it “small-in-one”; it really is the tiniest all-in-one printer I’ve ever had on my desk.

The set-up was, by far, the easiest of the last three printers I’ve set up in my lifetime (including an HP TouchSmart colour wireless printer and the Canon PIXMA MX432 colour printer). It came with the right software, which installed quickly and led me to directions that were really easy to follow. There was absolutely no trouble setting up the wireless connection, either. Easy peasy from start to finish.

Beautiful colour printing with very little drag at all, meaning your font doesn’t have any of those annoying halos around it and your colours are clear without random bleeds.

As I write this, the EPSON Small-in-One printer is on sale at Best Buy for $49.99. That’s a helluva good price for an all-in-one printer. In fact, if you’re thinking of buying new printer ink (which I find incredibly expensive) for your old printer that’s doing just an OK job, you might consider just spending $5 more for a whole new printer.

It’s not as quiet as, say, the $3,000 printer at my office, but it’s not very noisy as printers go.

I love having access to an SD card slot right on the printer. It means that you don’t ever need to plug it into your computer, even to scan documents. Instead, you can simply save your scan(s) to an SD card, then upload the files to your computer. This is especially handy if you’ve got your printer several feet away from your computer or up on a shelf.

THE GAFFE

And it’s a good thing you don’t need to plug it in to do the basics. Because the EPSON XP-410 Small-in-One doesn’t come with a damn USB cable. Well, fine, I thought…no bigs…I’ve got plenty of USB-to-USB wires kicking around. But no; oh, no. The end that connects to the printer isn’t what I would call a “standard” USB port. It’s the one with four quadrants of pins. That means that I can’t do anything that involves sending information directly to the computer (such as scanning to my email or desktop, for example). So that’s annoying because it adds an extra step when I don’t need it to since my printer sits right beside my computer. So, dear EPSON: just include all the wires, please. What does it cost for a USB wire, an extra dollar?

I don’t know if it’s because I got a sample from EPSON that had made too many rounds or if this is simply a design flaw on all of the Small-in-One printers, but the back part where the paper sits in doesn’t slide up nicely. It gets quite wonky on one side and starts to really resist being pulled upwards. The first time was the worst but I realized it was slightly off its “track” and I managed to snap it back into place. But it still groans as it heads north. And

The time it takes to actually print once I give it the command to do so from my computer is exceedingly, excruciatingly long. If you’re in the process of printing out your will, you might just be dead by the time the thing actually prints. But once it does print, it’ll look great (see “good” section).

THE GEARS

3.5/5