Everybody needs a good printer at home: no matter how digital our lives become, there are bound to be times when we need a warm printed paper(s) in hand. This could be for a school report, a long legal document to be read, a paper copy of a bill or receipt, or for printing a picture or two from the hundreds residing on your phone or computer.
Our family was definitely in need of a new printer. I’m sure we are not the only ones with printer horror stories to tell: getting unknown error messages, paper jams at the most inconvenient times, dropping wireless connection (a.k.a. mysterious disappearing acts), and the ever-popular extra long rattle-and-shake warm up routine. One of ours played favorites with laptops: worked for one, not for others, nice long start-up and warm-up time, printed slowly and complained loudly when it did, and was big toner ink hog. So, yes, we were ready to receive and try out the new Expression Premium XP-6000 Small-in-One® printer from our friends at Epson.
Epson is an long-trusted, well-known brand, making printers for both homes and businesses. The new Premium XP-6000 Small-in-One® is targeted towards home use. While there are many all-in-one printers on the market, promising printing, scanning and copying (once upon a time they touted faxing too!), not many live up to our expectations. This one does a pretty good job. Although it was a bit heavier than I expected, it is small in size, with dimensions of 13.7″ x 19.8″ x 5.6″. For comparison, it takes up about 30% less precious desktop space than our last printer. All such printers take up time for set up and this one isn’t any different. Put aside about 30 mins or so to unbox, install the ink cartridges and perform all the alignment checks. It does look pretty snazzy with a nice black matte finish on top. No touch screen but not a surprise at this price point. It was very easy to connect to our wifi network (yay!), however, do keep in mind that while printing your laptop or iPad should be on same network as the printer.
After set up we put the printer through its paces to test out the claims, and most came out aces:
- Easy to load paper: check! (having separate trays for different sized paper does help and loved that it automatically selected the appropriate tray based on selected paper size)
- Printing quality and speed: quality was great, print speed was great but came in a tad slower than the 15.9ppm claim (by our admittedly unscientific tests)
- Photo print quality, using premium glossy paper, was fabulous, similar (if not better) to a store print service
- Scanning was fuss-free and took all of 10 seconds. We tested out the app for this (I think this is a great feature for those of us too lazy to get the cheaters out to read the instructions on the display!).
- There are slots for memory sticks so if you have one those lying around those should work, but we didn’t have any to test (all cloud all the time)
- Ink life is claimed to be high, ours seem to be still reasonably full after the various print jobs we’ve done over the past couple of weeks.
- App quality and ease of use: app layout is utilitarian but it seems to do its job well
So this printer is small, prints fast and with high quality, including photos, scans well, connects to wifi easily and prints from any device you have (laptop, desktop, tablet or phone), and isn’t very expensive. The wow feature is indeed the photo print quality, even at a relatively large 8″x10″ size. The set up time, the position and manual nature of the output tray and the quality of the display screen could be better, but these are reasonable trade-offs for the economical price point. All-in-all, this is a solid printer for everyday home use.
Product received, thank you to the PR for supplying us with a product for this review, all opinions are our own.
