Epson has a long tradition of making great multifunction devices for the Mac and it might have another winner on its hands here. The Stylus Photo PX710W doesn’t have all the features that some of its competitors in this test boast, but it’s still a very capable machine.

We really like the design of the Epson; its clean lines are very stylish. It has a number of useful little touches too – the double-hinged paper tray cover and the fold-out control panel to name just two. We were also impressed by the integral CD printing tray, which slides out at the touch of a button. There are no fiddly adaptors, just pop in your printable CD and that’s it. The PX710W uses six separate ink tanks with the usual cyan, magenta, yellow and black supplemented by a light cyan and a light magenta to help with colour print accuracy.

Although once you’re used to them the Epson menus are easy to follow and navigate, we did have a slightly steeper learning curve with this all-in-one than with some of the others. That said, it doesn’t take long to get up to speed.

Print quality from the Epson was good. This was especially evident with the colour prints, which were vibrant and full of detail. Text was a little less sharp, with some characters not as crisp as we’d have liked. The business document with a mixture of colour graphics and text looked very good. The PX710W managed to produce good quality images on plain paper and balance the different colours and text styles well. The scanner was fast and accurate, but conversely the copy function was sluggish to say the least. At over a minute to produce an A4 colour copy the Epson was 40 seconds slower that the next slowest model.

The PX710W doesn’t have an automatic document feeder or a fax, so if you really need those you’ll have to look elsewhere. However, in all other aspects this Epson is truly first class. We had some minor quibbles with the text quality, but pictures were very good, the design is great and it’s simple to use. Add in the WiFi and Ethernet connectivity and the built-in CD printing tray, and the Epson Stylus Photo PX710W starts to look like a really attractive proposition.