Stylus C110

With a small footprint, relatively poor build quality and a tendency to jam, Epson's Stylus C110 screams budget printer. Unfortunately, its price tag doesn't fully reflect its intended market; this is perhaps its biggest failing. Still, for those after a cheap and quick printer without great quality, the C110 will do the job.

It isn't the smallest printer we've seen, but its size and black fascia help to create an unimposing design. However, it isn't possible to fit the C110 into a tight space because it uses a manual rear paper tray rather than a front pull-out paper feeder.

As we've come to expect with Epson machines, the C110 doesn't have the best build quality. Opening the front paper output tray requires the user to first open the printer's ink cartridge cover — a confusing method. The printer's hinges don't feel as fragile as those we saw on the Epson Stylus CX5500, but some seemingly indifferent engineering caused a few too many paper jams for our liking while testing.

Nevertheless, printing speeds are decent. The printer managed to push out standard text documents at 20 pages per minutes in draft quality. At normal quality, this slows to 12ppm, a pace that rivals mid- to high-end inkjets. Draft quality documents with graphical elements and highlighted text also printed at acceptable speeds — 13.3ppm. This slows quite a lot to 4.1ppm after changing to normal quality settings.

As with most Epson printers, the C110 tends to take shortcuts when printing draft quality documents, using much less ink and pushing paper as fast as possible, leading to faded text and numerous paper jams. Paper jams aren't as frequent at normal quality, but the printer intermittently misprints text documents, with only three-quarters of a page being printed before it's pushed out.

Photo printing clearly isn't one of the C110's strong points. Its speed is disappointing, with the printer struggling to print normal 4x6in photos in 2min 39sec. Full-sized A4 photos are slower still, at 5min 40sec. However, the most disappointing thing in terms of photo printing is simply the quality. Colours are generally washed out and don't resemble their real-world counterparts, and blacks are faded to the point of looking grey. There is also some very slight banding.

The quality of normal documents is more acceptable. Text is clear and readable, with only some slight hints of messiness upon close inspection. The difference between quality settings is noticeable, even in text documents — draft documents are quite faint, while documents printed at the normal and best quality settings have much better blacks.

We did notice that when printing in draft quality mode some pages remained faint whereas others had intense colour. As with photos, colour in graphics is very inaccurate (but it is consistent). There is no evidence of banding and the quality of graphics is fine.

Although the C110 is certainly has poor print and build quality, its speed is unrivalled for its price. It should provide a cheap printer for those who need jobs done fast.