Epson Stylus NX430

Epson Stylus NX430

A small inkjet multifunction printer with an overly long name, the $100 (as of January 24, 2012) Epson Stylus NX430 Small-in-One All-in-One Printer is well suited to tight spaces, and it offers excellent output quality and ease of use. The unit's main drawbacks are merely average ink costs, pedestrian speeds at the default settings, and no automatic duplexing. Overall, the Stylus NX430 is easy to set up (via either USB or Wi-Fi) and use. The main installation is a breeze, and the touch-panel controls for the 2.5-inch LCD are easy to use (and rare on a $100 printer). Epson includes its mature and competent Epson Scan 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 control panel. You may have to add the exception for the Epson event manager yourself. Many users might never realize that push-scanning is an option. Mac users must download the event manager software 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 feed holds 100 sheets of paper, and a front output tray accommodates 30 sheets.