One of the best selling printers in the UK at the moment is the Epson Stylus SX215 printer which you can get currently at places like Amazon – for under £45.  It’s pretty incredible when you think about it, but again as always I do warn about these very cheap printers – especially if you’re going to use the SX215 to do a lot of color or photo printing.

Having said that it’s not a bad little printer, individual inks, memory card slot and reasonable print quality.  The quality of the build is reasonable, although I did find it very loud especially when loading pages it makes a right racket.   Of course for the price you’d expect a few niggles when it comes down to it.

Epson Stylus SX215

The running costs are reduced slightly because it has single color cartridges which means you can just replace a single unit at a time.  Thankfully most printer manufacturers do this nowadays.

If you can live with these niggles though it’s a reasonable quality, cheap multifunction printer.  But I do want to stop you here to consider, if you a fair amount of printing you must consider the running costs of this machine.

The costs equate to just over 10p a page for color A4 printing if you include paper and about 3-4 pence a page for black and white printing.   This would alter if you used cheaper compatible toners for instance.

This is not a cheap printer to run when you consider some laser printers can print A4 color sheets for about 2 pence a page, even many of the slightly more expensive inkjet printers like some of the HP and Canon machines can print at 5 or 6 pence per page.   If you’re doing quite a bit of printing the low cost of the printer can soon be eroded if you’re paying an extra pound for every 20 sheets printed for instance.

If you just print the odd page from the internet and a few photos, it’s fine but saving a few pounds on the cost of the hardware can be a false economy if you use your printer a lot in color.  As always with printers – make sure it’s the right hardware for your needs – the Epson Stylus SX215 can be a bargain for some but a very bad buy for others !