Cheap all-in-one printers are becoming all but ubiquitous in high street retailers. However, there’s often a sting in the tale when it comes to running costs, so how does Epson’s new CX3600 measure up? Colour printing is actually very reasonable, working out at 7p per print (based on the usual five per cent ink coverage). You’ll probably manage even better colour ink economy in real terms, as each of the three colour cartridges (as well as the black one) are individually replaceable, so you don’t need to throw magenta or yellow ink away, for example, just because the cyan tank has run out.

While colour print price is frugal, the news isn’t so good when it comes to mono output. The standard Epson T0441 black cartridge costs the best part of £20 and is only good for around 400 pages (and works out to nearly 5p per A4 page). However, all the inks used are from Epson’s Durabrite range, so prints have the advantage of being almost completely water-resistant, smudge-proof and very slow to fade in sunlight.

The CX3600 is easy to use both as a regular scanner or printer hooked up to the PC, as well as in standalone photocopy mode. A neat selection of buttons enables you to copy text documents or photos at either A4 or 4x6in photo size, or even to make photo enlargements. Once you’ve selected your document type and page size, all you need to do is to hit the mono or colour copy button to print between one and nine copies of the original. It’s almost too easy.

As for speed, Epson claims mono and colour print performance of up to 15 pages a minute, and photocopies at up to 12cpm. Single-page prints and copies are a different story, though, and in our tests, the CX3600 took two minutes and seven seconds to copy a 4x6in photo, and 30 seconds to copy an A4 text document.

When photocopying, the text quality is slightly on the grey side, although blacks are richer in normal quality print mode, driven from the PC. Colour rendition is also good, especially for a four-ink printer but, as with other Durabrite printers, photo output does lack a bit of gloss. All in all, the CX3600 is a handy piece of kit and good value for colour work, although expensive mono printing costs are a drawback.
Matthew Richards