Epson Expression Home XP

A quick glance at the Epson Expression Home XP-5200 All-in-One Printer's name suggests it's aimed squarely at home users. But a generous 150-sheet paper capacity makes it potentially suitable for a home office as well, as long as you don't mind that its copying and scanning is limited to one page at a time on a letter-size flatbed. It delivers fast speed and impressively good output quality for its $129.99 list price, and its features include the ability to send scans to the cloud, print from mobile devices, and even print remotely over the internet. All this isn't quite enough for it to replace the Brother MFC-J4335DW as our top pick for light-duty inkjet all-in-one printers for a home office. But the XP-5200's slightly better photo quality, and some features that go beyond the basics, will be enough for some to prefer it.

The XP-5200 weighs just 11.9 pounds and is easily small enough to share a desk with. It measures just 7.4 by 14.8 by 13.7 inches (HWD) with the output tray closed, adding 6.1 inches to the depth with it open. Physical setup is simple. Remove the packing materials, then follow the instructions to install the ink cartridges and align the printhead. The manual alignment is a little tedious compared with AIOs that let you print an alignment page and then scan it for automatic alignment, but it's typical for Epson's inkjet AIOs.

The driver, scan app, and other software must be downloaded from Epson's website, following the steps in the included Quick Start guide. The guide also covers downloading the Epson Smart Panel app to a mobile device, which will let you both print from and scan to your phone or tablet via Wi-Fi Direct or a Wi-Fi network. In my tests, it worked as promised using Wi-Fi Direct.

The XP-5200 supports Epson Connect, as well, which works with most current Epson printers. Once set up, Epson Connect will let you both print via the internet and scan to several cloud sites—including Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, and Box—directly from the printer's control panel. The panel comprises a 2.4-inch LCD readout and buttons, rather than a touch screen. You can also send scans to the cloud from your PC, using Epson's ScanSmart app.

In addition to the 150-sheet capacity for up to legal-size sheets, paper handling for printing includes auto duplexing (two-sided printing). However, the lack of a second tray, or even a single-sheet bypass, limits the printer to light-duty use in most homes or home offices, since you have to swap out the paper whenever you need to change from one type of paper to another.

On the plus side, the 150-sheet capacity means you shouldn't need to refill the tray often. Printing even as much as 600 pages per month would keep the chore down to about once a week, while printing to the limit of Epson's 800-page maximum recommended monthly duty cycle would mandate refills only slightly more often. For scanning, the printer is limited to one page at a time on an 8.5-by-11.7-inch flatbed, so although you can print at legal size, you can't scan legal-size originals.

The running cost is on the high side, as is typical for cartridge-based inkjets. Based on the cost and yield for the high-capacity black and standard cyan, yellow, and magenta cartridges (the only choice for color inks), the ink cost is 6.4 cents per mono page and 21.7 cents per color page. Keep in mind that running costs tend to be higher for less-expensive printers than for more-expensive models with similar features. As always when comparing printers, focus on the total cost of ownership to see which one will cost less in the long run, rather than focusing on either running cost or initial cost alone.

The XP-5200 turned in some impressively fast speeds for its price in our performance tests, using a USB connection to our standard testbed PC. For text, it printed our 12-page Word file, not including the first page, at 15ppm (44 seconds), a touch faster than its rated 14ppm, just behind the MFC-J4335DW's 16.1ppm (41 seconds), and noticeably faster in real-world use than the third-place Canon Pixma G3260 (11.4ppm, or 58 seconds) or last-place Canon Pixma TR4720 (9ppm, or 1 minute and 12 seconds).

The Epson and Brother printers also delivered faster first page out (FPO) times than the two Canon models, which translated to finishing in the same order when including the first page. Here again, the MFC-J4335DW was in first place at 14.7ppm (49 seconds), the XP-5200 all but tied at 13.8ppm (52 seconds), the G3260 in third place at 10ppm (1:12), and the TR4720 trailing at 8.3ppm (1:27).

The printers finished in a different order for the business applications suite, which adds files that include graphics and color. The MFC-J4335DW managed a convincing first place, at 2:23 (10.5ppm). followed by the XP-5200 (3:15, or 7.7ppm), the TR4720 (4:48, or 4.9ppm), and the G3260 (7:30, or 3.9ppm). For 4-by-6-inch photos, the XP-5200 averaged 1:20 each.

The printer's output quality was impressive as well. Every font in our tests that you'd likely use in a business document or schoolwork was easily readable at 5 points, though looking through a loupe showed ragged edges and some small gaps in lines at 6 points in most fonts and 8 points in some. The two heavily stylized fonts in our suite with thick strokes were also more readable at small sizes than typical for inkjets, with one easily readable at 8 points and the other easily readable at 6 points.

Color for graphics on plain paper using default settings was nicely saturated, though better described as pastel than vibrant. I saw some slight posterization (color changing suddenly, where it should change gradually) on one particularly hard-to-reproduce gradient, slight banding in a dark green background, and more obvious banding in a solid black background. But most fills and gradients were smooth, and even a single-pixel-wide line on a black background was crisp and clean. Photos on Epson's recommended Premium Photo Paper Glossy using the High Quality setting showed some slight loss of shadow detail, but were at the high end of drugstore quality overall.

On our ink smudge tests on plain paper, black text smudged slightly from water, but stood up to a highlighter with no smudges at all. Color inks resisted smudging from water, but the pages were left with water stains.

The XP-5200 scores nicely on speed and output quality for the price, but you'll want to compare it with each of the other printers mentioned here. In addition to faster speed and lower running cost, for example, the MFC-J4335DW also offers a 20-sheet ADF for scanning and a one-sheet bypass tray so you can print on different types of paper without having to swap out paper in the tray. However, it doesn't match the XP-5200 for photo quality. It also costs more, so while its extras keep it firmly in place as our Editors' Choice pick for the category, its lower running cost may or may not mean a lower total cost of ownership, depending on how much you print.

The TR4720 costs less than the XP-5200, while adding a 20-sheet ADF. But aside from being a slower printer than the XP-5200, with lower paper capacity, it uses a tri-color cartridge, which can drive up running costs by forcing you to throw out unused ink every time you run out of one color. The G3260, meanwhile, has the lowest running cost in this group, and it delivers good photo quality. But it's also the slowest and the most expensive of the four, so you'll have to print a lot of pages for its total cost of ownership to be lower than for the XP-5200. All that said, if you don't need an ADF or top photo quality, and want fast printing, good-quality text and graphics, and features like remote printing, the Epson Expression Home XP-5200 is a solid light-duty AIO.

With high-quality output and fast print speeds at default settings, plus remote printing support, Epson's Expression Home XP-5200 All-in-One printer is at home in a home office.

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