Flash corner

 The Epson  Stylus DX6000 is very similar to the DX5050 but costs £14 more, for which you get a few extra  bells and whistles  .

 For a start it has a 2 inch lcd screen which  sits on the left side of the device ,  however  it’s fixed in place at a set angle, different the adjustable screens on many of it’s competitors devices  .  The printer itself is very  uncomplicated to use with plenty of buttons, although the only copy-resizing method is a simple fit-to-page option. The paper trays are the same as those on the cheaper model, as is the detachable scanner lid and the door on the front that conceals the memory card slots. It takes four separate ink cartridges, which aren’t too expensive to replace, so running costs are reasonably low . The Epson ink cartridges are numbered T0715 for the multipack or individually they are T0711/2/3/4.

Ink cartridges for the Epson stylus DX6000 are what Epson call Durabrite and are pigment based.  The quality of text documents printed using the DX6000 wasn’t quite up to scratch . We saw a significant amount of spidering around characters and colour documents had a slight graininess. Black areas were very slightly tinged brown , and draft text suffers from the same faint and broken appearance as that of the DX5050. Photos have a  tendency to look a little bright as well  .

Like the DX5050, the DX6000’s scanner is its best feature. It produces perfectly captured colour tones and a reasonable level of detail. The driver software offers modes for beginners and experts. It’s not quite as sharp and focused as its cheaper sibling, but it’s one of the better scanners in the group . This has the knock-on effect of producing good quality copies, too, with mono copies being especially  good  .

 The DX6000 is not the fastest printer on the planet  , with a mono print rate of just 3.4ppm falling to 1.6ppm for colour. Six photos took over 20 minutes and a colour copy took almost a minute, while a 1,200dpi photo scan took nearly three-and-a-half minutes to complete. Overall not a bad machine, with the scanner being the highlight.