If you were to judge the value of a printer purely on how large and intimidating it looks, the Epson Stylus C43UX would seem like excellent value; it's easily the largest printer in our roundup, and arguably the most striking in visual appearance, with a combination two-tone grey and black facing. Actual installation involves just a tad more work than with most of the other printers in our tests, inasmuch as the paper tray is a seperate component. Like the Canon i250, the C43UX doesn't use a seperate power brick, choosing instead to incorporate its power adaptor within the body of the printer itself, although it does use a slightly chunkier power cable to light itself up with. Where Epson did draw our admiration was by including a USB cable with the C43UX; with every other printer in our roundup you've got to add a few dollars (or already have a spare cable) before you can begin printing; the C43UX really does work out of the box with what's already supplied.
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Text output for both our plain text and colour document pages was exceptionally crisp and clear, but there was a major catch -- it was also remarkably slow. A single page of plain text took 39 seconds to output, some 15 seconds slower than the nearest competition, and even multi-page printing didn't improve matters much. If you can spare the time, though, in the text printing category -- where, to be honest, printing quality was quite close between all units -- the Epson ruled the roost in quality terms, but at the absolute cost of time.
Where the C43UX really fell flat was in our A4 photo printing test, where it took a whopping 36 minutes and 9 seconds to complete printing, eight and a half minutes behind the Lexmark z605. To put that in perspective, the Canon i250 managed the same test in four and a half minutes complete. Again, quality wasn't an issue -- there was little difference between the i250 and C43UX in photo printing quality terms with both producing prints that were better than we'd expect for a printer in this price range -- but you'd want to have a large cup of coffee on the go before starting most photo prints on the C43UX.
Epson's black and colour cartridges sell at competitive prices, only just pipped at the post by the cheaper i250's cartridges. A single black cartridge will cost you AU$18.95 while the colour equivalent comes in at AU$30.95. With expected page yeilds of 330 and 180 pages respectively, that works out to 5.72c per black page and 17.2c per colour page. Those are very solid figures, making the Epson run second only to the Canon i250 in terms of running costs.
We like the quality of the Epson Stylus C43UX's print output a lot; in a very close field it edges ahead of the competition in normal print text quality in both colour and black, and matches up well with the Canon i250 in photo print quality terms. The big limitation however is that the underlying printer itself is sluggish at best, making it a great unit if you're prepared to wait, and a poor unit if you're not.
Epson Stylus C43UX
Company: Epson Australia
Price: AU$99
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 361 054
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A Canon wins and the ads on the site are for Epson? Ya gotta love that.