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The Epson Expression Premium XP-640 Small-in-One Printer ($149.99) is a photo-optimized all-in-one printer (AIO). It performs well for what it is, and its print, scan, and copy quality are good overall. The XP-640 has a small footprint and, given its price, an impressive feature set. Unfortunately, like most other entry-level photo printers, it also has somewhat high running costs.
Design and Features
One of Epson’s original marketing points for the Small-in-One family was its printers’ relatively small footprint. The XP-640 ($329.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) measures 5.6 by 15.4 by 19.8 inches (HWD) and weighs a relatively light but sturdy 21.5 pounds. Yes, that counts as small, but nowadays you can find competing models that are often as small and even lighter, such as the Editors’ Choice Canon Pixma MG5720 Wireless Inkjet All-in-One ($586.45 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) (also a five-ink photo printer, like the XP-640), which measures 5.9 by 18 by 14.6 inches and weighs just under 14 pounds.
When it comes to features, the XP-640 comes with a few more than that entry-level Pixma. The XP-640 can print from and scan to USB thumb drives and SD cards, it lets you print on pre-surfaced CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs, and it comes with bundled software for designing and printing jewel case inserts. It also supports Wi-Fi Direct, a peer-to-peer protocol that allows you to print from or scan to a mobile device without it or your printer belonging to a network.
To get these features from a Pixma, you’d have to step up to the Canon Pixma MG7720 ($969.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) . It’s a six-ink photo-centric AIO with essentially the same feature set as the XP-640, though there’s one key difference: The MG7720 supports near-field communication (NFC), another peer-to-peer protocol that allows you to connect to the printer simply by touching your mobile device to a hotspot on the chassis. A feature, or lack thereof, common to the XP-640 and the Pixmas discussed here is that, while all have scanners for scanning and making copies, they all lack an automatic document feeder (ADF) for feeding multipage originals to the scanner.
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Many of the mobile features discussed so far, as well as connection to cloud sites and other walk-up functions such as making copies or printing from a memory device, are executed from a control panel consisting of several buttons and a 2.7-inch LCD. Epson calls it a “touch” panel, but you actually navigate with a set of arrow keys and an OK button, not by touching the screen.
Media Handling
If anything points out the XP-640’s status as a low-volume machine, it’s the paper-handling options. The main input drawer holds up to 100 sheets of plain paper, and nested inside the main drawer is another, smaller tray that holds up to 20 sheets of premium photo paper—the point being that you don’t have to empty and configure the main drawer each time you want to print a snapshot.
Printed pages land on a dinky 30-page output tray that pulls out just above the paper cassette. You can print labels on pre-surfaced optical discs via a small caddy that slides into the printer, just beneath the control panel.
Print Speed
Low-volume printers like this one don’t need to be particularly fast, which is fortunate for the XP-640. It’s not too slow for most home or home-based office environments—it is, after all, a photo-optimized model designed to print images first—but it’s still one of the slowest printers we’ve tested since we started using our updated testing regimen earlier this year. It’s also slower than most competing AIOs when printing business documents.
See How We Test Printers
When printing our lightly formatted MS Word text file, the XP-640 churned at 9.5 pages per minute (ppm), or about 3.5ppm slower than Epson’s 13ppm rating. As is the case with most printers, this one bogged down considerably when printing our heavily formatted, graphics- and image-laden color documents. This time, the XP-640 managed 3.2ppm, which again isn’t terrible for this particular printer. But if you are likely to regularly print long documents (say 10 pages or more), this printer probably isn’t for you.
On the other hand, the XP-640 is much faster, relatively speaking, at printing photos. It churned out our 4-by-6-inch snapshot in an average of 25 seconds, which is one of the better times for an inkjet.
Output Quality
Print quality hasn’t changed much since the previous generation of this printer, the XP-630. Like it, the XP-640’s text output is nothing special, but it’s more than acceptable for most home uses. Graphics and photo quality were good in testing, with no noticeable banding in backgrounds and gradients, and photos were well detailed and accurately colored. Without question, the XP-640’s photos came out looking good enough to do justice to your keeper snapshots. Good as they were, though, their overall vibrancy, accuracy, and detail didn’t quite come up to what we saw from the Pixma MG5720.
Running Costs
The importance of how much a printer costs to use increases the more you print, and the XP-640 is meant merely for light-duty use. When you use the highest-yield ink tanks for this printer, black-and-white pages run about 4.7 cents each and color pages cost a stiff 13.7 cents. Yes, these numbers are high, but again not so much for a low-volume photo printer. On the aforementioned Canon MG5720, for example, monochrome pages run about 4 cents each and color pages 12.7 cents.
You should keep in mind, though, that these prices don’t include the Photo Black ink cost, which, since it’s not really possible to tell when it kicks in and how much ink it uses when it does, there’s no way to accurately calculate a per-page cost. It’s safe to assume it’s used only when printing photos, but that probably includes photos embedded in larger documents, too. If you a lower cost per page is more important to you than excellent photo print quality, you might consider an entry-level office-centric printer, such as the Editors’ Choice Brother MFC-J985DW ($592.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) , with its running cost of about 1 cent for black-and-white pages and 4.7 cents for color.
Conclusion
If the best photos for the money are what you’re after, you should check out the Canon MG5720. But the Epson Expression Premium XP-640 Small-in-One Printer is still a decent value, providing good overall print quality and a more well-rounded set of features, including support for SD cards and USB thumb drives, as well as Wi-Fi Direct for routerless connections with mobile devices. In addition, you get optical disc labeling, which would require an upgrade of about $50 to the MG7720 were you to go with a Pixma.
3.5
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Although it’s not the perfect inkjet printer for every use, the attractively priced Epson Expression Premium XP-640 Small-in-One Printer prints terrific photos and has a strong feature set.
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