The low cost, good looks and straightforward operation of the CX5100 make it a good choice for home or SOHO users.
The CX5100 easily fulfills the definition of an all-in-one printer, scanner and copier, with a performance that challenges that of standalone printers in terms of print quality and speed. Suited for a small office or home, the unit comes up strong with its speed, compactness and design. The CX5100 features Epson's Photo resolution performance management (RPM) which creates impressive 5,760-optimised dpi photo prints.
Well designed for small offices, the CX5100 comes with foldable output tray to help save space when the unit is not in use. The document guard helps to keep paper flat by not allowing it to bend forward as with most printers. The controls are easy to figure out, even without use of either the online or printed manual. Another impressive feature is the ability to copy two or four reduced-sized pages into one single A4 sheet.
Setup of the Epson Stylus CX5100 was a breeze. Epson has included a quick setup guide to help end-users get started. Epson has even bucked the trend of printer vendors by including a USB cable with the unit.
The driver CD handles driver and application installation smoothly. This smooth operation is kept going by the use of a control program known as the Epson Smart Panel. Smart Panel allows you to easily select a range of scan as well as print options. The CX5100 comes with the Presto! engine, an acceptable but weak OCR (Optical Character Recognition) package. Compared to Omnipage, we found more errors with Presto! when scanning heavily formatted columns. In fact, it has trouble with any text which has a dark background, regardless of text colour. However, most tasks which include reading and transcribing scanned words into readable text are accomplished accurately.
Photo printing is one area where the CX5100 starts to shine above the recent influx of affordable AIOs in the market. Boasting both Epson´s DURABrite Ink and Photo RPM technology, the CX5100 comes out strong with its photo prints, creating sharp and vibrant photos on plain and photo paper. Text prints are generally clear and sharp, typical of most inkjet printers on the market. In terms of print speed, the CX5100 is fairly fast, clocking in just below the speedy Canon imageclass MPC200. Our only complaint is that the CX5100 lacks the ability to create borderless prints. That job is left to its smaller sidekick, the CX3100.
The CX5100 also comes with other useful features such as double-sided printing, fit-to-page printing, poster printing, watermark printing and the above-mentioned ability to print two or four pages per sheet. Oddly, however, these are PC-specific features; if you're using the CX5100 under Mac OS X, you'll only have a plain-jane printer at your disposal.
In our tests, the scanner let down the CX5100. While the images remained sharp due to a 1200 x 2400 dpi optical resolution, the images lost a little of their colour fidelity and contrast, leaving what looked like a slightly washed-out image. Monochrome scans, on the other hand, were much better. It's also rather annoying that the CX5100 leaves a 2.5mm vertical and horizontal gap on the scan area which causes edges to be cut off.
Because the CX5100 does not have a document feeder, copy speeds will never be decent. In addition, due in part to its scanning capability, copies of photos turn out much like the scanned photos, showing a lack of vibrant colours. Again, as before, its monochrome copies turned out much better. The CX5100 makes up for this shortcoming by including other useful features such as tone adjustment, paper size settings, reduce or enlarge settings, and zooming capability from 25 to 400 percent in 1 percent increments.
At a retail price of AU$599, the Stylus CX5100 makes a very affordable home and SOHO all-in-one unit.
Epson Stylus CX5100
Company: Epson Australia
Price: AU$599
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 361 054
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