REVIEW: Epson Stylus D120
It’s great to see that Epson hasn’t forgotten about home workers and small offices - it offers an extensive choice of one business inkjet! The Stylus D120 is a smart-looking A4 colour inkjet printer designed for those who do more than print holiday snaps. As well as producing impressive text quality and colour graphics, the 4-colour unit is one of the fastest in its class. With speeds up to 37ppm in black and white and 20ppm in colour (Draft Mode), it is ideally suited to relatively busy offices producing marketing or in-house materials. The Stylus D120 is also pretty robust, unlike most flimsy consumer inkjets, so should be able to take the strain of office life.
The wholly-black Stylus D120 (£59) uses Epson’s individual ink cartridge system, so only the colour that is used needs to be replaced. The benefit of this is that running costs are kept to a minimum as you only need to replace individual colours as and when they are needed. Another couple of other features which stand out are that it’s Certified by the Energy Star international standard - with only 15-Watts power consumption it’s more energy efficient compared to a laser printer - and a Network Edition (includes 802.11b/g Wireless and 10/100Base-TX External Print Server) is available for those who want the convenience of wireless printing.
At first glance the Stylus D120 (435×240x161mm, 3.9kg) is like any other desktop inkjet. However, it has a few neat technical innovations under its hood. Epson has integrated an innovative Dual Black Ink System into the Stylus D120 which increases print speeds and page yields. As a result small businesses that need a productive and cost-effective printer should find the Stylus D120 a suitable low-cost alternative to a colour laser printer - it’s certainly more efficient than other inkjets. In addition, the printer supports high-capacity black ink cartridges, allowing for even higher print yields and larger volumes of text-based documents. Unlike similar-priced monochrome laser printers, it provides the flexibility to print high-quality documents and photos in colour.
The model’s impressive printing speeds are achieved as a result of Epson’s new Micro Piezo print head mechanism. The print head has hundreds of tiny nozzles for ejecting ink droplets with the very highest levels of accuracy. The number of nozzles dedicated to black ink has been doubled and when combined with an increase in the speed of ink ejection, the print speed for black text is maximised. This means that in its fastest mode it will print up to 37ppm in black-and-white, but when the quality of the document is paramount speed will drop significantly to around 5ppm.
Featuring the latest generation of Epson’s DuraBrite Ultra Ink, documents from the Stylus D120 are as durable and smudge-proof as any other from an inkjet, in addition to being water and highlighter pen resistant. Manual double-sided (duplex) prints are also supported, and the DuraBrite Ultra Inks do a good job of not bleeding through the page. Black text is sharp for an inkjet using regular copier paper, but to make the right impression with customers you’ll need to invest in high-quality inkjet paper. The Stylus D120 does a good job of doubling up as a recreational printer too, producing above-par borderless photos up to A4 size at a maximum resolution of 5760×1440dpi. Epson bundles its own PhotoEnhance software utility for improving photos quickly, and the utility also recognises skintones, landscapes and skylines to enhance colour settings.
Many small businesses are using inkjet printers for private offices or for the home office, due to their low initial cost compared to a personal laser printer. Epson has designed the Stylus D120 specifically with these customers in mind. In addition to print speeds comparable to an entry-level personal monochrome laser printer, the high-yield Dual Black Ink System offers extra convenience for more demanding customers with large volumes of black text printing. The printer is also much more compact and energy efficient compared to a laser, and with DuraBrite Ultra Ink it offers a range of colour printing options from text and e-mail printing to graphics and photos.
That’s where the good news ends. We’re disappointed the Stylus D120 doesn’t come with an Ethernet port (single USB 2.0 port only), and as it’s not an all-in-one printer you can forget about scanning, photocopying, and faxing. And unlike most personal lasers, the Stylus D120 doesn’t support automatic duplexing. Furthermore, its paper input try only accommodates 120 pages - hardly a workhorse!
For individuals wanting to print their own short-run promotional materials in brilliant, high-quality colour easily, the Stylus D120 is worth a look. For producing razor-sharp business documents to send to customers, as well as large-run materials in-house, you’d do better with a colour laser (available for less than £250). A colour laser would also be a much better choice for sharing within small work teams, due to better paper handling and driver support, as well as higher monthly duty cycles. [7]
