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This is 42x45x14cm with paper input and out trays extended. It is cream with a grey lid for the scanner. To install everything took only 10 minutes on a reasonably fast PC, very little intervention is required once you have decided what to install as the software installations are linked. It took 435MB of hard disc space.

Printing nonsensical 200 word documents in draft mode came through at 15PPM, however a 1500 word document spread over four pages was only slightly over 8PPM and to be honest I was not happy with the grey shading and the horizontal lines that form the letters were clearly visible making it seem like dot matrix output. This mode on the unit is really only suitable for proofing.

See also: Multifunction printers

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This is a four ink offering, however unlike most other units of this kind it is not two cartridge (one for black and one for the colour containing the three colours) there are four cartridges extremely useful if you tend to use predominately one colour so you do not end up having to throw away part used cartridges simply because one colour is exhausted.

As regular readers will know as far as printing photos is concerned I am not over worried about printing times only the print quality. The print quality over a range of images printed A4 borderless and four images to A4 page borderless is fine however printing was slow. I recently remember a unit that took under four minutes to print similar images the time taken by the DX3800 was 14 minutes and 10 seconds, so bad that I repeated it, quality fine, speed naff.

With these units I always tend to copy a few pages after the insertion of ink cartridges and before I have installed the software just to check the unit is working okay. A lot of people will use the unit with the PC off just for the odd copy or three. I was quite happy with the quality and certainly if you need colour copies the price of a stand alone colour copier is still high. However not all is perfect as the speed was not good, just on two minutes for a full A4 colour copy and around 40 seconds for the same page in black and white.

The quality of the scanning engine is fine - copying is a good way of proving that - and the OCR software is perfectly adequate giving quite acceptable results. Should you do a lot of copying then a full copy of 'whatever' scanning software is always going to give better results as it learns as you use it, but for anyone who does a bit of copying, some scanning and mainly printing a full price scanning software package is not really on.

This is rather a curates egg of a product, poor draft print quality, normal and above are fine, printing speeds are slow especially for photo images, copying speeds are also slow but output is fine. Having separate colour cartridges is something that could appeal but I have to say that at or near the price there are better units out there.

www.dabs.co.uk have it for £63.43

http://www.epson.co.uk/products/all_in_one_products/Stylus_DX3800.htm