The Epson Stylus SX218 is the new budget multifunction inkjet designed to offer quality and value for money. When talking about value for money and inkjet printer it doesn’t just mean a cheap purchase price, it also means reasonable running cost in terms of the price of the replacement printer ink cartridges. A set of Epson SX218 ink cartridges cost around £30 which is reasonable compared to other printers in this price range. Another advantage of the Epson SX218’s ink cartridges is that each colour has its own individual cartridges and is economical because only the colour that’s empty needs to be changed. The SX218 offers a wide range of functions including direct photo printing from memory cards and PictBridge enabled cameras and well as PC-free document copying. The scanner works well although does have a slight magenta cast on colour scans but in general is performs well for a variety of documents. The strongest feature of the SX218 is its printing quality, it better than you get from printer twice its price. The vivid colour tones are impressive for a machine with a four colour ink system and all prints have good sharpness. The weakest area of the SX218 would have to be its printing speed, the printer itself is not painfully slow is just made worst by the fact that Epson claimed on the spec sheet that it capable of 34ppm (pages per minute) which is a ridiculous claim when you consider in the real world the SX218 is only capable of 4ppm.