Epson Expression Home XP-422 review

Epson calls the Expression Home XP-422 a 'small in one', which makes us wince but to be fair is descriptive: this is a very compact inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFPs). It's attractive enough, with an angled control panel comprising a colour screen and touch-sensitive keys.

There's Wi-Fi and an SD memory card slot, but no automatic duplex (double-sided) printing. Paper is fed from an uncovered 100-sheet tray at the rear, and printed pages end up in a simple but sturdy tray at the front.

There are comprehensive apps available for mobile devices; here we're using Android

The XP-422 is more sophisticated than an entry-level device, but it still misses out on some of the flashier features found on mid-range MFPs. The lack of NFC support isn't a major stumbling block, but there aren't any downloadable modes or functions either, which is a shame as they can often be useful. Certain cloud services are supported, but they aren't configured directly from the printer as they are on some rivals. For example, you can scan to Evernote or Dropbox, but you first need to configure one of these as the destination for the Scan to Cloud function by logging into the Epson Connect website.

You need to log in to the Epson Connect site to configure the MFP's Scan to Cloud button

Oddly, you can't print documents or photos stored on the same cloud services. Similarly, while you can scan to an inserted SD card, or print the photos stored on one, you can't make direct prints of other document types like PDFs. This admittedly isn't an office MFP, but it still seems like an omission.

We doubt many users will explore the web admin interface, but it's quite comprehensive

This isn't the fastest MFP, even when connected via USB, but on the plus side the XP-422 is fairly quiet. It printed normal quality text at the sedate pace of 8.9 pages per minute (ppm), although this almost doubled to 16.9ppm at draft quality. Colour printing was far slower, with our graphics-rich test inching out at 2.4ppm and each 6x4" photo needing almost three minutes. Scanning was generally more competitive, except at high resolution: a 1,200 dots per inch (dpi) scan of a 6x4" photo took over two minutes.

There's nothing wrong with Epson's straightforward print interface, which also offers advanced options

Epson's scan interface is our favourite; here we've used auto marquee in the preview window

Fortunately the results looked very good. Text was reasonably dark and sharp, and colour graphics were crisp, with their impact enhanced by bold and bright colours. Scan quality was great, aside from a slightly soft focus, and photocopies had unusually well-judged exposure and colour accuracy. Photos also had accurate colours and were reasonably sharp, although there was some subtle grain in lighter regions.

This printer takes four consumables, with an XL version of each available. While these help to reduce the amount of ink changing you'll do, they don't keep print costs especially low: each page of text and graphics will cost around 9.4p, of which the black component amounts to 2.8p. While this is a good MFP for the money, we'd pay £15 or so more for Canon's PIXMA MG5650, which is faster, produces comparable results or better, has duplex and is cheaper to run.