The Expression Photo XP-960 Small-in-One ($299.99) is the top-of-the-line model in Epson's current generation of Photo Small-In-One multifunction printers (MFPs). It's a little pricey for what it offers, given that it was was slow in testing, and the quality of its text was below par, but the XP-960 ($266.98 at Amazon) is well worth considering if you need a printer for home use and want to print occasionally on paper as large as 11 by 17 inches, particularly for large-size, borderless photos.

Don't let the combination of the XP-960's price, the word "photo" in its name, and its ability to print large images mislead you into thinking it's an MFP equivalent of the single-function Canon Pixma iP8720 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer ($214.99 at Adorama) , our Editors' Choice consumer-level near-dedicated photo printer for up to 13-by-19-inch output. It's really more of a general-purpose home model, much like the less-expensive Epson Expression Home XP-420 Small-in-One ($289.99 at Amazon) , albeit more capable.

Basics

Core MFP features in the XP-960 are limited to printing from and scanning to a PC, plus working as a standalone copier. Like most MFPs meant for home use, it lacks some important office-centric features, including an automatic document feeder (ADF) and fax capability. However, it offers both an Ethernet port and Wi-Fi capability, so you can share it easily on a network.

The XP-960 can also print from and scan to a memory card and can both print to a printable optical disc and copy an image from its scanner directly to a disc. It can even print to a disc directly from a memory card or a USB key. The LCD control panel earns praise for both its well-designed menu system and its 4.3-inch touch screen, which is big enough to make giving commands particularly easy.

Paper handling is disappointing for the price, but a lot better than what we typically see in a home printer. The main tray holds a meager 100 sheets and is limited to a maximum size of 8.5-by-11-inch paper. Helping make up for the low capacity, however, is a built-in duplexer and a second tray for up to 20 sheets of 5-by-7-inch photo paper. Having a photo tray means you don't have to swap out paper in the main tray every time you switch between printing documents and photos.

There's also a rear tray for up to tabloid-size (11-by-17-inch) paper. However, it can hold only one sheet at a time, which limits its usefulness, and you can't simply put a page in the tray and then print, which makes it a little inconvenient to use. You first have to send the print job to the printer and then wait for a message on the front panel telling you to load the paper. If you load the paper first, the printer will send it to the output tray without printing. And if you to print a multipage job, you have to wait after each page for the printer to tell you when it's okay to insert the next one.

Mobile Printing and Scanning to the Cloud

Also going beyond the basics is support for printing through the cloud, as well as printing from and scanning to a phone or tablet through an access point on your network. If you connect the printer to a single PC via USB cable rather than a network, you'll lose the ability to print though the cloud, but you can still take advantage of the printer's Wi-Fi Direct to connect directly to it and print from or scan to a mobile device.

If you register the printer with the Epson Connect site, you can also use front-panel commands to scan to selected cloud sites (Dropbox, Evernote, Box, and Google Drive). In addition, Epson provides a scan utility that lets you send scanned files to selected sites even if you connect to the printer via USB cable.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality

At 5.8 by 18.9 by 16.3 inches (HWD) and 19 pounds 6 ounces, the XP-960 is smaller and lighter than most printers that can print on tabloid-size paper. Setup is standard fare. For my tests, I connected the printer to a network using its Ethernet port and installed the software on a system running Windows Vista.

I timed the XP-960 on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at 4.9 pages per minute (ppm), which makes it slow, given how much it costs. In comparison, the similarly priced Epson WorkForce Pro WF-5620 ($299.99 at Epson) —our preferred pick for a color MFP for heavy-duty use in a micro office—came in at 10.3ppm on the same test.

The XP-960 was faster on our business applications suite than most home printers and near-dedicated photo printers. The home-oriented Epson XP-420 managed only 2.6ppm, for example, and the Canon iP8720 scored 2.7ppm. Photo speed for the XP-960 is suitably fast for an inkjet, averaging 1 minute 4 seconds for a 4-by-6-inch print in my tests.

Output quality is a little subpar overall, but only because of lower quality text than most inkjet MFPs. Graphics and photos are both typical for the breed. Fortunately, even though the text quality was near the bottom of the range for inkjet MFPs on our tests, it's still good enough for most home use. As long as you don't use fonts much smaller than 10-point size, you shouldn't have a problem with it.

See How We Test Printers

Graphics output on plain paper in our tests was easily suitable for home use and even good enough for most business use, including PowerPoint handouts and the like. Even more than with most inkjets, however, the graphics quality varied on our tests, depending on the paper. With the plain paper we use for testing, colors were a little dull and thin lines tended to fill in. With Epson's Premium Photo Paper Glossy, however, colors were vibrant, and overall quality is suitable for professional graphics work, despite the tendency for thin lines in some graphics to fill in.

Photo quality on photo paper is a match for the high end of what you'd expect from drugstore prints—for color photos at least. With a black-and-white photo, I saw obvious tints in some shades of gray. That lowers the overall score for photos, but if you print color photos only, that won't matter.

Conclusion

What makes the Epson Expression Photo XP-960 Small-in-One stand out is its ability to print at tabloid size—a feature that's rare among MFPs and even rarer for a home MFP. It's also what makes it pricey. Unless you need the feature, you'll be better off with otherwise comparable, but less expensive, models like the Epson XP-420 or the Canon Pixma MG5720 Wireless Inkjet All-in-One ($377.00 at Amazon) , our Editors' Choice for inexpensive home MFPs. For more frequent printing at a large size, you may want to consider the single-function Canon iP8720, but then you won't get any MFP features. The XP-960 fills a niche between those two levels of choices.

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