Pros & Cons
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- Extraordinarily fast.
- High-quality output, particularly for text and photos.
- Ink is smear-resistant, even on plain paper.
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- Only limited potential for the dual role of home and home office, with features that concentrate on home use.
Epson Stylus NX515 Specs
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Adobe Acrobat 8 - 4 pages, text and photos (landscape): | 0:58 (min:sec) |
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Excel 2003 - 1 page, graph: | 0:16 (min:sec) |
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Excel 2003 - 1 page, table A (with grid): | 0:08 (min:sec) |
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Excel 2003 - 3 pages, charts and graphs: | 0:39 (min:sec) |
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 - 4 full-page slides: | 0:57 (min:sec) |
| Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Word 2003 - 2 pages, text: | 0:14 (min:sec) |
| Claimed lifetime for photos - dark storage: | 300 years |
| Claimed lifetime for photos - exposed: | 46 years |
| Claimed lifetime for photos - framed behind glass: | 83 years |
| Color or Monochrome: | 1-pass color |
| Connection Type: | Ethernet |
| Connection Type: | USB |
| Connection Type: | Wireless |
| Cost Per Page (Color): | 12.9 cents |
| Cost Per Page (Mono): | 3.2 cents |
| Direct Printing from Cameras: | Yes (via cable) |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | CompactFlash Type I |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | CompactFlash Type II |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Memory Stick |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Memory Stick Duo |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Memory Stick Pro |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Memory Stick Pro Duo |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Microdrive |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | MiniSD Card |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | MultiMedia Card |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Secure Digital |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | xD-Picture Card |
| Ink Jet Type: | Standard All-Purpose |
| Input Capacity (printer input only): | 100 sheets |
| LCD Preview Screen: | Yes |
| Maximum Scan Area: | 8.5" x 11" |
| Maximum Standard Paper Size: | Legal |
| Network-Ready: | Yes |
| Number of Cartridges: | 4 |
| Number of Ink Colors: | 4 |
| Photos - HIGH -QUALITY SETTINGS - Adobe Photoshop 7 - Average output time per print: 4" x 6" prints : | 2:05 (min:sec) |
| Print Duplexing: | No |
| Printer Category: | Ink Jet |
| Scanner Optical Resolution: | 2400 pixels per inch |
| Scanner Type: | Flatbed |
| Standalone Copier and Fax: | Copier |
| Type: | All-In-One |
| Water/smudge proof or resistant: | Yes |
Last year, when Epson introduced its Stylus NX models, I reviewed the
As with the NX400 last year, the NX515 is this year's top-of-the-line NX model. It's not the direct replacement for the NX400, however; it's a newly added step up, with Ethernet and WiFi support. (It also has a somewhat different print engine from the other models in the line, so except where I specifically say that a given comment in this review applies to other NX models, don't assume that it does.)
Whatever the relationship between the NX400 and NX515, it's very much worth mention that the NX515 addresses every shortcoming I saw in the NX400 last year, while carrying forward almost all of the NX400's strengths. And although it's designed primarily as a home AIO, it has some potential for the dual role of home and home-office AIO as well.
The NX515 prints and scans, even over a network, and it works as a standalone copier. It can also scan to e-mail, by automatically launching the e-mail program on your PC and adding the scanned document or photo as an attachment.
The focus on home use shows in the printer's high quality for photos and scans; the ability to print from PictBridge cameras, memory cards, and USB memory keys; the 2.5-inch LCD for previewing photos before printing; and a special photo copy feature—in addition to standard copying—that can, for example, scan two 4-by-6 photos at once, and print each one on a separate sheet of paper. Unlike the NX400 (and NX415, according to Epson), the NX515 has enough memory for the photo copy feature to work with a letter-size original.
If you want to use one printer for both home and home office, the NX515's Ethernet and WiFi connections make it easy to share. And if you rarely need it for any office task other than printing, it will fit into a dual role quite nicely. It lacks two key office-centric features, however—a fax modem and an automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning multi-page documents.
The lack of an ADF in particular makes the NX515 highly limited as an office tool. On the other hand, thanks to the pigment inks Epson uses in the entire NX line, output on plain paper is highly smear resistant, which can be particularly useful for business documents. You can, for example, use a highlighter on text without smearing it—something you can't do with the output from many ink jets.
Setup and Speed
Setting up the NX515 on a wired network, which I used for my tests, is standard fare. Once you find a spot for the 7.2- by 17.7- by 13.5-inch (HWD) printer and remove the packing materials, you can plug in the cables, load the four ink cartridges, load paper, and then run the automated installation routine from disc. I ran my tests using a Windows Vista system, but according to Epson, the disc that ships with the printer also includes drivers and a full set of software For Windows 7, XP, XP x64, 2000, and Mac OS X versions 10.3.9 and above.
In my review of the NX400, I mentioned that I was surprised by how fast the printer was—at 15 minutes 20 seconds for our business applications suite. The NX515 surprised me again, cutting the time down by roughly 45 percent, to 8:32 (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software).
That's fast. Nothing in the NX515's price class comes close. In fact, the next fastest ink jet AIO I've tested at anything like the price is the office-centric Editors' Choice
Output Quality
The NX515's photo speed is less impressive than its speed for business applications, averaging 2:05 for each 4-by-6 and 4:41 for each 8-by-10, but the output quality more than makes up for the moderate speed. The only important flaw that our test photos turned up was a tendency to lose extremely thin lines, so the thin white numbers on a clock face in one photo, for example, were partly filled in. However, this is not an issue that is likely to crop up on a lot of photos, and in my tests it was, paradoxically, only a problem in the Best Photo mode rather than the theoretically lower-quality Photo mode.
I also saw a slight differential gloss on glossy photo paper, with light reflecting differently from different colors in the image at some angles, so dark areas suddenly merged together and lost all detail from those angles. To see this effect, however, you need a nearby point source of light, like a desk lamp, and a fairly extreme angle, so I don't consider this a serious problem.
Except for the one photo with the filled-in numbers on the clock face, all of the photos easily qualified not only as true photo quality, but better than what I expect to see from drugstore prints. The printer even did a great job with monochrome output, with smooth gradients and no visible tint over the entire range from white to black.
The photos were also highly water resistant and scratch resistant in my tests. And thanks to the pigment inks, they promise to be long lived, with a claimed 83-year lifetime framed behind glass.
Along with the high-quality photos, the NX515 offers better-than-par text quality and fairly typical graphics quality for an inkjet. More than half of the fonts in our text tests qualified as both highly readable and well formed at 6 points, some qualified at sizes as small as 4 points, and none—not even highly stylized fonts with thick strokes—needed more than 10 points. The text doesn't offer the crisp edges that you get from a laser, so I wouldn't use the NX515 if I needed something to look fully professional, like a resume. But you shouldn't have any complaints about the text for anything short of that.
Graphics quality is more than good enough for any home use, from schoolwork to printing party invitations, and any internal business use. Depending on how demanding you are, you may consider it good enough for output going to an important client who you need to impress with your professionalism. I saw some banding and obvious dithering in default mode, but not in the highest-quality mode. The only significant problem I saw was a tendency for thin lines to disappear, a problem that shows up with many, if not most, printers on our tests.
Ultimately, the NX515 excels as a home AIO and as a home-office printer, if not as a home-office AIO. Few inkjet AIOs at any price offer comparable speed for business applications or comparable quality for text and photos, much less match the NX515 on all three points. Fewer still offer smear resistant output on plain paper. With all of these strengths, plus the convenience of Ethernet and WiFi connections, the NX515 not only earns its Editors' Choice award with room to spare, but resets the bar for what to expect from a home AIO.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
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