The Epson Expression Premium XP-6100 Small-in-One Printer ($149.99) is an adept photo-centric all-in-one inkjet intended for home-based and family offices with low-volume print and copy requirements. An upgrade to last year's XP-6000 and a step down from the Editors' Choice XP-7100, it's somewhat lacking in productivity and convenience features, but churns out excellent-looking borderless photographs and standard documents. It's not robust and feature-rich enough to dethrone the XP-7100 as our favorite home office, photo-oriented AIO. However, it costs $50 less, making it a solid, budget-friendly alternative.

Small and Nimble

At 5.6 by 13.7 by 19.8 inches (HWD) and weighing 14.6 pounds, the XP-6100's physical attributes are the same as its predecessor's, and about 25 percent smaller and lighter than the XP-7100. Also similar in size are the Canon Pixma TS9120 (another Editors' Choice consumer-grade photo AIO) and the HP Envy Photo 7155 All-in-One Printer. None of these AIOs will take up much room on your desktop. None of the models mentioned here so far have an automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning multipage documents, with the exception of the XP-7100 . Instead, you must place each page on the platen (scanner glass) one at a time, scan it, remove it, and then do the same with the next page.

You set up scans and copies, as well as many other functions, from your computer or mobile device, or you can configure these and other tasks, monitor the printer, generate reports, and more, from the XP-6100's control panel. The options here are Power, Home, Back, display navigation, and copy control buttons, which are anchored by a 2.4-inch non-touch color screen.

The XP-6100's main paper tray holds a meager 100 sheets of standard letter-size (8.5 by 11 inches) or legal-size (8.5 by 14 inches) paper. Just above that is an auxiliary tray that holds up to 20 sheets of premium photo paper. This paper capacity is, at this level of consumer-grade photo printers, anyway, somewhat common.

Like most consumer-grade printers nowadays, the XP-6100 supports smart voice activation through Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and standard IFTTT (If This Then That) scripting. And finally, like the XP-7100 and the TS9120, the XP-6100 supports printing labels on pre-surfaced CD-ROM and DVD optical discs, via a small tray that you insert just above the output tray, as shown below.

Convenient Connectivity and Software

As home-based AIOs go, the XP-6100's connectivity options are more than adequate. Standard interfaces include connecting to a single PC via USB 2.0, Wi-Fi, and the popular peer-to-peer network protocol, Wi-Fi Direct, for connecting mobile devices to the AIO without either it or them being part of local area network or connected to the same router. Other physical connections include a USB port for printing from and scanning to thumb drives and PictBridge-compliant digital cameras, as well as a port for printing photos from various flavors of SD cards and microSD cards used in digital cameras and mobile devices.

Third-party mobile connectivity options include Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Fire OS drivers, Mopria Print Service, and Epson's Easy Photo Scan. Epson also provides a handful of Android and iOS utilities it calls Epson Connect. Included in that suite are Epson Email Print, Epson Remote Print, Epson Scan to Cloud, Epson iPrint App (iOS, Android), Epson Print and Scan App (Windows), and Creative Print App (iOS, Android).

In addition to the standard printer and scanner drivers, the XP-6100's software bundle includes Epson Print CD, Epson Scan, Epson Easy Photo Scan, and a PDF User Guide.

Faster Than the Competition

Epson rates the XP-6100 at 15.8 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 11.3ppm for color prints. To verify that, I put it through a series of tests over a USB connection from our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.

On the first test, printing a 12-page Microsoft Word text document, the XP-6100 churned at an average score of 15.7ppm, all but matching Epson's rating and beating the XP-6000 by 2.5ppm and the XP-7100 by 0.8ppm. It also pulled ahead of the Canon TS9120 by 2.6ppm and the HP 7155 by 1.8ppm.

The next part of our benchmark tests entails printing a suite of colorful and complex Adobe Acrobat documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint handouts with embedded business graphics. Then, I combined these results with those from printing the 12-page text document from the previous test and came up with a score of 6.6ppm for printing our entire suite of test documents. That score beat both the XP-6000 and the XP-7100 by a hair, the TS9120 by 1.9ppm and the Envy 7155 by 2.8ppm. While not by much, today's XP-6100 managed to outpace all the competitors mentioned here.

Outstanding Photographs

Most consumer-grade photo printers have an advantage over typical inkjet machines in that the former typically deploy more than the standard four process color (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) ink cartridges. The XP-6100, for example, comes with an additional "Photo Black" ink, that, according to Epson, enhances and deepens black areas in photos.

Some other consumer-grade photo printers, such as the Epson Expression Photo HD XP-15000 and Canon's Pixma TS9120, use six inks. Nearly all of them churn out brilliantly colored, highly detailed photographs. The XP-6100 is no exception. (An additional perk here is that it can also print borderless images.)

It also reproduced our charts, graphs, and other business graphics quite well, with hardly any noticeable streaking or banding, with solid fills and gradients flowing evenly from one tint or color to the next. I've no complaints about the XP-6100's photo or graphics output, nor was I disappointed with its text output. Overall, though this is not a business printer, per se, its print quality is plenty good enough for most business applications.

Low-Volume Running Costs

Most consumer-grade photo printers, especially those that use five or six ink cartridges, have running costs of close to 5 cents per monochrome page and encroaching on 20 cents per color page, which is right around what it costs to use the XP-6100. If you're printing only a couple of hundred pages or so each month, these running costs are most likely acceptable, or at least passable. The more you print, of course, the more it costs to use the printer.

If your use case includes a higher volume of printing, you have two options to save cash in the long-term. First, you can pay more up front to get a model like the Expression Premium ET-7700 , a five-ink model that lists for almost four times the cost of the XP-6100 but has running costs that are less than 1 cent for both black and color pages. Or, you can go with a four-ink model like the HP Envy Photo 7155, one of that company's Instant Ink-ready models. If you subscribe to the right Instant Ink program, you can get monochrome or color pages for as little as 2.9 cents per page.

An Excellent Photo-Centric AIO

If you're looking for a little printer to churn out family photos and the occasional letter or homework assignment, the XP-6100 should serve you well. It's fast compared with similar printers, and produces exceptional photos. Choosing it over the Editors' Choice XP-7100 means saving $50, but giving up an ADF for scanning and copying multipage documents. If that's not a feature you see yourself using often, then the XP-6100 is a great-value AIO for low-volume home use.