Epson Stylus DX7000F tested here
Although It’s fairly common for mono laser multifunction devices, or MFDs, to send and receive faxes, this feature is rarely found on an inkjet all-in-one .
Epson’s Stylus DX7000F has a built-in fax modem, but otherwise is a fairly standard all-in-one machine .
Although the DX7000F isn’t particularly expensive, it is Epson’s top of the range of general purpose MFDs. It has a memory card reader and a PictBridge USB port for making photo prints direct from your camera , and a colour screen for previewing the contents of an inserted memory card. You can do some basic editing before you print a photograph , or back up the card’s contents to a connected computer.
The DX7000F’s printer uses four separate ink cartridges, which install quite simply . Ink cartridges for the Epson stylus DX7000F are numbered T0715 for the multipack, which offers the best value.
Epson’s print driver offers a choice of five quality settings, and with Epson ink cartridges installed, we were hopeful of some good print results. None of the five settings produced particularly clean black text on plain paper. The printer’s Draft settings (these are what Epson quote thier speed settings on) produced faint, stripey characters, so we ran our 50-page draft test using Text mode, which was very slow . The colours in graphics on plain paper were solid and streak-free using the Text & Image setting, but also appeared dull and lacklustre . Photo prints were better, but skin tones looked a little pale and washed out .
However , the DX7000F’s scanner was more impressive, and this has been noted on other Epson all-in-ones throughout the range . It captured sharply focused images, recording plenty of detail from both very light and very dark areas. Colours were accurate , too, but it was slow at high resolutions . Our 1,200dpi (dots per inch) test scan of a 6×4-inch photograph took over three minutes, this was much longer than we’d expect.
A useful feature would have been a automatic document feeder (ADF), but this is sadly lacking , so you have to load each page of a long fax and make copies one page at a time. This is a pain, and makes the DX7000F an unconvincing fax machine .
