Epson's Stylus CX6600 is a fantastic value all-in-one printer that should satisfy all but the most demanding digital photographers or business users. Regular home users, or even small businesses, should welcome the printer's performance, speed and robustness, but it's let down by an unintuitive on-screen menu and the lack of a built-in fax or NIC. Otherwise, the Stylus CX6600 would have been given our Editors' Choice Award. If you can handle these shortcomings, the Stylus CX6600 represents excellent value for money.
Pros: Borderless prints and copies; built-in memory card reader
Cons: No fax; no built-in NIC; doesn't support film scanning
Epson's latest all-in-one printer is designed to improve the quality and cost efficiency of home and small office printing. Sporting a similar design to the company's proficient Stylus Photo RX600 (£237), the two-tone grey Stylus CX6600 combines a relatively speedy 4-colour inkjet print engine (up to 22ppm), a colour flatbed scanner (1200x2400ppi) and copier, along with a built-in memory card reader.
The Stylus CX6600 also uses Epson's high-quality - and separate - DURABrite inks for smudge proof, water and fade resistant prints, and comes with new Web printing and photo-restoration software. Other key features include the ability to photocopy independently of a computer, the capability to print from and save to digital memory cards, as well as the ability to create borderless prints and copies up to A4 size. Unfortunately, there's no fax functionality, which may limit its appeal to home workers, and no USB interface on the front of the unit for connecting PictBridge or Direct Print-enabled digital cameras, should you want to print directly from your digital camera or attach a Bluetooth print adapter.
The Stylus CX6600 sports a robust and practical design that's untypical of products in this price range. There's no flip-out 2.5in. LCD monitor like on the Stylus Photo RX600, but there is a memory card slot cover that protects the unit's card slots (Compact Flash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick/Pro, SD/MMC, miniSD Card, xD-Picture Card). The scanner lid is easy to lift and conveniently rests at a 90-degree angle to the platten, making inserting and placing material to scan an effortless process. The lid can also be removed by gently lifting the it up and away from the unit's body, should you want to scan bulky materials. The way the whole top part of the unit lifts and rests to allow you to change the four ink cartridges is also practical and reassures you of the Stylus CX6600's build quality.
The all-in-one printer can be used to print and copy independently of a computer. If you want to scan material, you first have to connect the unit to your PC or Mac. The 2-line, non-backlit LCD panel on the front of the unit is then used to configure settings and read status/error reports. Unfortunately, the control buttons aren't labelled, so it'll take you a while to become familiar with the button layout and their actions. For instance, it's not initially clear that the icons on the four 'action' buttons refer to the unit's Copy, Card Print, Scan and Setup modes. If you don't select the correct button, the menu interface won't correspond to the action you want to perform, such as printing from a memory card.
Copying documents is straightforward, once you've figured out which is the copy button. You simply lift the scanner's lid and place the source material onto the platten. From the front control panel you can then change the paper type (Plain, Matte, Glossy or DURABrite Photo), print quality (Draft, Text, Image or Best), paper size (A4, 10x15cm or 4x6in.) and number of copies (1-99). You can also reduce, enlarge and zoom in/out of images, and the copy density can also be changed by nine steps. Borderless copies can be made, you can make a copy with a 1.5mm margin all around, and you can make up to 16 copies of an image on a single sheet of paper. If the LCD panel indicates low ink while you are copying, you can either continue making copies until the ink runs dry, or stop making copies and replace the ink cartridge. Similar to all of the device's functions, you are made aware of any settings that can be changed by the green illuminated buttons.
Printing independently of a computer is also quite straightforward and images up to 4600x4600 pixels in size can be printed directly from a compatible memory card (JPEG or TIFF files formats only) without even turning your computer on. Before committing to high-quality outputs, an A4-only index form can be printed that gives you a thumbnail view of all the photos stored on a memory card. However, it's worth remembering that an index form may be several pages long, especially if you're using a high-capacity memory card. From the printed index form you then use a dark pen to fill in the circles that appear underneath the photos you want to print (along with the paper type), place the form on the scanner, and then activate the 'scan index'. The images you selected are then printed. If that all sounds a little long-winded you may be pleased to know that you can print individual photos, multiple photos, or all of those on a memory card (up to 999 images).
The Stylus CX6600 also allows you to scan images to a memory card in JPEG format, to a computer or directly to e-mail. However, it doesn't support the scanning of film. Scanning to a memory card is quick and simply requires you to insert a memory card, place the source material on the scanner, and then press the Scan Mode button. From there you can select the appropriate document type (text or graphic), print quality (Normal, Photo, or Fine) and scan area (auto or max). Scanned images are then saved in a new folder on your memory card called 'epscan'. Alternatively, scans can be sent to your computer using the supplied Epson Scan and Epson Smart panel driver software supplied with the printer.
We were really surprised by the Stylus CX6600's exceptional print quality on a variety on media. The printer's 4-colour printing system (up to 5760dpi optimised) uses variable-size ink droplets as small as 3pl to create detailed images with little visible evidence of dithering or banding - even using the software's default settings. Text quality on regular paper was tight and controlled with little evidence of bleeding and areas of solid black appeared rich and convincing, a feature rarely seen with all-in-one devices. Photo reproduction was also above par on regular paper, although dithering and banding was more obvious. Swapping plain paper over to Epson's special photo paper produced truly outstanding results considering the relatively low cost of the printer. Print speed was commendable too, even bettering the more expensive Stylus Photo RX600, although we only managed to get 14ppm out of the print engine - a long way off Epson's claim of 22ppm.
Overall, the Stylus CX6600 is a fantastic value offering that should satisfy all but digital photographers looking for a high-end imaging solution. Regular home users, or even small businesses, should welcome the printer's performance and robustness. It's a real shame the unit's on-screen interface is unintuitive, the buttons aren't clearly labelled and there's no built-in fax, otherwise the Stylus CX6600 would have been given our Editors' Choice Award.
Links:
Stylus CX6600 performance results
Stylus Photo RX600 performance results
Stylus CX6600
Web site
About our tests:
BIOS uses a range of popular office-type documents to test the image quality and speed of printers and all-in-one devices. Our test suite comprises an A4 photograph (34MB, PSD format), 6x4in. photograph (5MB, PSD format), 12-page text file (90KB, RTF format), 12-page PDF (1.2MB) and 20-page presentation (2.5MB, PRZ format). For our throughput test we print a single dot onto multiple A4 pages. Unless otherwise indicated, printers are tested using default print settings. In all but the throughput test, the higher the number, the slower the printer. Print quality is subjectively analysed by the reviewer, based on experience and comparisons to printers we've previously tested.
