I purchased the Epson Stylus SX205 for my home office about 12 months ago to replace a broken printer and an aging scanner.

My pet hate with printers has always been the mess that's caused by paper jams but I have no such issue with the SX205. I've never had a paper jam, the only slight problem I've had is with it not feeding the paper through if it's too tightly packed - an issue that is totally down to operator error!

Document print quality/speed is not a problem and I have confidence that if I send a 40 page document to print I can then step out of the office rather than watch over the printer.

The quality of photo prints isn't the best but it is more than sufficient for general use (this is not specifically a photo printer after all). I tend to use the SX205 for an initial print to ensure that I am happy with composition, contrast and the suchlike before getting photos professionally printed.

The scanning abilities of the SX205 are good and the software supplied is easy to understand and use. I tend to scan at very high resolutions and so the scans can take over a minute but that is solely down to my requirements, not a fault or criticism of the scanner.

The photocopier option I rarely use but when I have there have been no issues.

So why only 4 stars and not 5? The ink cartridges. The printer holds four cartridges, black, yellow, blue and magenta. The thing that does infuriate me, and has caused me to scream at the printer, is that when a colour runs out the printer will not even operate in black and white mode. So even if I only need a black and white document printed I still need to replace the yellow cartridge (for instance) before the printer will deign to work. A minor flaw but one that does cause my blood pressure to rise!!

Would I recommend this printer? Yes.