Epson Stylus NX430 Small-in-One All-in-One Printer Review: Compact, No Frills, Great Output - davisdorbacted

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Great text and photo output
Easy-to-use LCD and touchpanel

Cons

No duplexing support connected the Mac

Our Verdict

This home unit is compact and dolabriform, and it produces excellent output. Pricy inks and no duplexing restrict it to low-book use.

A small inkjet multifunction printer with an overly long-dated name, the $100 (as of January 24, 2022) Epson Style NX430 Reduced-in-One All-in-One Printer is well suited to tight spaces, and it offers fantabulous output timbre and repose of utilize. The whole's principal drawbacks are merely average ink costs, pedestrian speeds at the default settings, and no machine-controlled duplexing.

Overall, the Stylus NX430 is soft to set up (via either USB Oregon Wi-Fi) and use. The main initiation is a breeze, and the touch-panel controls for the 2.5-in Liquid crystal display are easy to use (and rare on a $100 printer). Epson includes its mature and competent Epson Run down software, though the company seems unable to manipulate the Windows firewall so as to enable scanning to a Wi-Fi-attached PC from the printer command panel. You may have to add the exception for the Epson upshot director yourself. Numerous users might ne'er realize that push-scanning is an option. Mack users must download the event manager software package and install it to add this capability. Push-scans via USB don't suffer from this problem.

Paper-handling features are minimal. A rear vertical course holds 100 sheets of paper, and a front output tray accommodates 30 sheets. As noted earlier, there's atomic number 102 involuntary duplexing; on the Mac, there ISN't evening support for manual of arms duplexing (the PC driver offers dialog boxes that walk you through the process of manual duplexing). The varsity letter/A4-size scanner lacks an self-winding text file feeder, and the scanner lid telescopes about 0.5 inch–enough to handle most magazines, just non most books. You'll also find card slots for Secure Digital and Store Stay formats.

Epson equips its printers with more print quality modes than other vendors do. You get "Economy" (what others might call "draft"), "Express economy" (an even quicker merely lower-quality draft), and "Fine" (where impress timbre takes precedence over economy and hurrying). Though "Double-quick economy" is fast, the resulting text edition is very buoyant and can be challenging to show. "Fine" output, along the other hand, is about atomic number 3 goodish as you'll get from an inkjet, with oceanic abyss blacks and sharp text. Color graphics have a air-cooled temperature palette, but they exhibit excellent detail on some plain and glossy paper. A couple of users volition find conclude to sound off about the Stylus NX430's output .

Unfortunately, the Stylus NX430's speed doesn't quite measure up to its print prize. Textbook and colored nontextual matter impress at a within reason 4.8 pages per minute. Photos printed to glossy stock are particularly slow: A uncomplete-foliate color photo prints to plain paper at an acceptable 2.85 ppm, but the same image prints to glossy paper at just 0.72 ppm. On the Mac political program, pear-shaped-page colorise photos print at entirely 0.28 ppm–indolent even by entry-level inkjet standards. Copies arrive at the very measured pace, simply scans are middling fast.

Ink costs for the NX430 are about mediocre–but only if you use high-relent supplies. The 415-page black tank costs $18.49, which works out to 4.45 cents per paginate, and the three colors–chromatic, magenta, and yellow–cost $17.09 per color OR 3.45 cents per page. That puts the price of a quatern-color foliate at about 14.8 cents. Epson also sells "moderate-use" cartridges: a 190-page black and 195-Thomas Nelson Page cyan, magenta, and yellow. At $12.49 and $8.49 per cartridge, however, they toll 6.6 cents per page for black and 4.35 cents per page per color, or a thumping 19.6 cents for a four-color page.

The NX430's production is very good for the price, and its space-saving design is an reward if your teensy Beaver State home office is quite immature (and if you aren't a Mac user World Health Organization needs duplex support). As wel, remember to set the firewall exception for button-scanning. Low-priced alternatives to this model include the Brother MFC-J430W and the Canon Pixma MX410.