While printer manufacturers are now making more all-in-one devices than single-function printers, most are aimed at photo-enthusiasts.

The Stylus DX7000F has been designed with the Small Office, Home Office (SOHO) market in mind and, as such, includes a fax.

It’s a four-colour printer that uses Epson’s robust Durabrite inks and also includes memory card slots that reside behind a smoked plastic cover on the front panel. However, because there's no image-viewing screen you'll need to print a photo thumbnail proof sheet to select which photos to print. We found it simpler to connect a digital camera and select images from the camera’s in-built display.

The Epson Stylus DX7000F’s control panel could be better designed. Function buttons for Copy, Fax and Photo print are only identified by icon and each is multi-functional, depending how many times you press it. There are, however, dedicated photocopy buttons and a number pad for dialling faxes. In essence, it's the most instinctive layout.

Setup is straightforward; clip in the four ink tanks, connect it to a computer via USB and, if fax is required, employ the phone sockets at the back. The supplied software bundle is fair, with Epson’s own Creative Suite that covers most scanning, printing and copying tasks, and ABBYY optical character recognition that will convert printed text into an editable word processing document.

Print quality is reasonable, though black text showed a little spread into normal paper and colour photocopies tended to be lighter than the originals. Photographic printing is fair for a four-colour device (some come with eight separate ink tanks for greater colour clarity), though images lose some lighter tones as there’s no dedicated cyan or magenta.

Unfortunately, print speeds are slow. We don’t know where Epson got its quoted figure of 27 pages per minute (ppm) from, but even in draft mode, we couldn’t better than 9.5ppm. In normal print-quality mode, a five page black text print took nearly two minutes and a 6 x 4in photo took just over two minutes from a memory card and just over three from a PC. Hardly impressive.

Overall, then, the DX7000F is well-featured multi-function device but, in terms of print quality and speed, it's not the best compared to similarly priced devices.

Vista compatible: Yes (with download)