The Epson stylus DX5050 has some good and bad points, one of the good point being the price .
At £55 including VAT, it’s certainly competitively priced , so we weren’t surprised to learn it lacks more expensive features such as a colour screen . Instead, it has a single-digit display, which limits you to making no more than nine copies at a time, and a single fit-to-page button for resizing your images .
It does however have some memory card slots and a PictBridge socket, so you can connect your digital camera , however the output tray is seems quite flimsy and struggles to hold more than 30 sheets of paper before tipping them on the floor.
The ink cartridges slot in nicely under the scanner and are very easy to fit. The DX5050 takes four Epson ink cartridges, these being black, cyan, magenta & yellow.
The DX5050′s scanner produces images that are full of sharpness and plenty of detail and, although slightly oversaturated, the colours are generally accurate enough to put it ahead of most other scanners here . The lid comes off completely to allow for fatter items, which is a nice touch, and it slots easily back on to the device again when you’re done .
This scan quality comes at the expense of speed . The DX5050′s scanner is the slowest in the group, and the printer isn’t much quicker when printing. Text documents appeared at just 3.4 pages per minute and suffered from visible spidery edges around characters . The draft mode boosts this to a healthy 15.3ppm, but the quality suffers and is not actually useable .
Ink cartridges for the Epson stylus DX5050 are the Durabrite pigment based variety. This according to Epson allows the printer to produce long lasting quality images.
Printing photos using the DX5050 was slower than using any device bar Brother’s DCP-330C . It took more than 20 minutes to produce six 6x4in prints. Much like the high-quality but slow scan results, though, photo prints were impressive , with accurate colours and sharp edges. The DX5050 scans well and produces nice quality photos, but it is very slow.
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