Epson America’s Stylus CX6400, $199 before a $20 rebate, could easily win a permanent place on my desktop, for it has one of the simplest — yet most profound — features I have seen in a long time, and it has nothing, directly, to do with printing.
On the front of the printer is a panel that contains slots for various digital media, such as a SecureDigital or xD memory card, or a Compact Flash (CF) card, including the one that I used earlier in the day to take photographs.
Silly me: I hooked up a card reader to my computer, in a less-than-convenient place, forgetting the card reader on the Epson printer. When I disconnected the card reader and placed the CF card in the printer, its contents were accessible via my computer’s desktop. The fun didn’t stop there, however. A few button presses on the front of the CX6400 and my image is printing out, without having gone through the printer.
As digital photography merges more with our daily lives, a device such as the Epson Stylus CX6400 will become important in many functions. It’s not the first to let users slide a digital media card into a slot and directly print photos or “contact sheets,” but its implementation is nice. It’s not the first to combine scanning — of documents or photos — with a printer, but that’s nice, too. And it’s not the first to offer sharp text printing for an inkjet, but it does.
What may set the CX6400 apart from many of its peers and almost all of its predecessors is its economics: At $199, or less depending on where you shop and on that rebate, it’s a highly reasonable price to pay.
The cost of replacement inks also seems reasonable: A high-capacity black ink cartridge can be had for about $30, and a four-pack of the individual color cartridges is less than $35. I have not run down the cartridges to see how many pages one gets, but I can imagine a good cartridge life when the device is used to print standard documents. Run off a bunch of copies of your vacation or wedding snapshots, and things might change. You will probably need to get more ink and photo paper more often.
But that’s a trade-off, I suppose: The Epson “DuraBrite” paper and ink yielded truly borderless 4-by-6 inch prints that were in every way the equal of anything I could get at my local processor. And I had the results in a minute or so, as opposed to an hour or a couple of days. Epson sent along a 100-milliliter bottle of water with a DuraBrite print sample submerged in the liquid; the ink didn’t run. I guess that will hold for my photo prints, too.
I have found the CX6400, as a regular-duty printer, to be as good as anything I have seen. It’s fast, up to 22 pages per minute in monochrome text printing, and it’s superquiet. The ink cartridges are easy to install; paper flows from the back to the front, reducing the chance of paper jams; and the scanner is a single-sheet device that can accommodate books and magazines. The unit functions as a stand-alone copier as well.
More information can be found at www.epson.com, as well as at retailers.
Correction: I erred last week in saying Gmail, the Google e-mail service, can’t import addresses from PC or Mac programs. It can — and does — when such address books are presented as “Comma Separated Value,” or CSV, files.
• E-mail MarkKel@aol.com or visit www.kellner.us.
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