There is no shortage of budget multifunction inkjet printers on the market and the SX218 is Epson’s latest offering and promises to offer more than the competition. First impressions are good with a large list of features but this is only half the story, the most important factor of a budget inkjet printer is the cost of its printer cartridges. The SX218 uses four individual Epson ink cartridges which work out to be quiet economical as they only need to be changed one at a time and they are reasonably price too. A set of Epson SX218 ink cartridges cost around £30 around competitive retailers and they yield a good amount of pages which makes them good value compared to the competition. As aid previously the SX218 has a good array of features including photo printing capabilities, direct printing from digital cameras and memory cards thanks to its built in memory card reader and PictBridge connection. The A4 flat bed scanner performs well from scanning a variety of documents as does the copier but is a little limited with it maximum 9 copies at a time but the quality is there. Print quality is excellent for a budget printer, the SX218 can produce photo prints of equal quality of that found from a photo lab as well as being perfectly capable of printing basic text documents to a above average quality for a printer in this category and price range. One less impressive feature of the Stylus SX218 is it speed, printing speed in particular is slower than average and while this will be a problem for people printing high volumes of documents it not so slow that it effects small print jobs. Overall the Stylus SX218 is a good all round value for money device.