Epson Stylus CX5500

Shiny surfaces on computer peripherals are usually synonymous with an incredible amount of fingerprint smudges just waiting to happen. But surprisingly, the piano finish on the Epson Stylus CX5500 all-in-one printer was a lot more-smudge resistant than we expected.

The CX5500 comes in a smart sturdy body with an elegant black finish that would suit just about any desktop out there. The whole look of the unit is very minimalist, with just the essential buttons on the left side for functions such as Power, Stop, Color Photo, Color Text and B&W photocopy.

There’s no support for memory cards here or any kind of a display, like some of the newer models available these days, but that’s kind of justified at its price point… kind of! Still, the printer looks sleek and the build quality will not give you any reason to complain.

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The CX5500 uses four ink cartridges (CMYK), wherein lies its biggest selling point — the ability to use normal capacity ink cartridges along with budget ones. In other words, while the normal capacity ink cartridges come for around Rs. 460, in case you figure that you don’t use a particular color, like say, yellow as much as you use the other colors, you have the option of buying the lower capacity ink cartridge of that color, which would cost you only Rs. 250.

It’s a pretty good feature to have. I can imagine many home users opting for the cheaper color cartridges, and going for the regular capacity black ink cartridge, which would better suit their requirements. Our tests, however, were all done using the regular capacity cartridges.
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I’ve always thought Epson has the best and the deepest black ink of all, and that remains true in this case as well. While in most other printers the black level seems a bit too much on the bluish side or the reddish side, Epson’s blacks appear perfectly… well, black.

This highly affects the color accuracy of a print, especially a photo print. Colors appear deeper and richer without being overly bright; in fact, our color gradient test was practically flawless with minimal visible banding, which is a rare thing for a printer at this price.

Photo print results, as I mentioned before were practically perfect in their color accuracy. The ink dots were not even visible by the naked eye, which scores a few extra points for the CX5500.

Text prints taken in normal ink settings weren’t too brilliant though, as there was a slight distortion around the text. I feel that would probably be caused by the printer letting out more ink than it needs to for a plain paper print. Still, it wasn’t all that bad, as text up to point 2 font size was a bit readable by the naked eye.

Now for the part I didn’t like, and is prevalent in all Epson MFDs I’ve tested so far — its slow speed. A full page A4-sized color print at highest quality on the CX5500 took around 10 minutes in contrast to the 3-5 minutes that other printers in this category needed.

In our speed test, where we print 20 sheets of a text document, the CX5500 took 5.41 minutes when MFDs from other manufacturers took 3-3.30 minutes on average. Sure, I could print in draft mode, where the speed is a lot faster, but the print quality would be interlaced and practically unusable.

The slow speeds were quite obvious in the photocopies as well, which is what makes the CX5500 a better option for home users, for whom slow speeds wouldn’t be that big a drawback.

We managed to get 136 prints from the CX5500, before there was a visible drop in quality in the outputs due to ink depletion. That number may not be the best result we got, but it isn’t bad either, especially considering that you need to change just a single color cartridge at a time.

Epson gave us the price of the printer as Rs. 4,999, but a little inquiry from the retailers got us a price closer to Rs. 4,100. At either price, the Epson printer makes an excellent buy for home users who look for the highest quality photo prints at that price, and are in no particular hurry.

However, if you’re looking for a fast workhorse with high print outputs, look elsewhere!