Affordable Inkjet Printer

The Stylus Color C41SX is an affordable inkjet printer for homes and small offices. It can print at a maximum resolution of 1440 x 720 dpi, and boasts of photo printing capability even with its regular color and black ink cartridges. Unfortunately, this printer supports a parallel port interface only. There’s a different version of the same printer with a USB interface, namely model C41UX, but that’s only available with PC-bundling schemes, and not in retail. The printer has drivers for all desktop Windows versions. 

The Stylus C41SX can hold up to 100 sheets in its input paper tray. It can print in three modes-normal, economy and photo, which are further sub-divided into more categories for different types of printing. The smallest readable font in normal mode was 2, but with some amount of jaggedness. It took 38 seconds to print a single page document, and 35 seconds to print subsequent copies of the same document. It took about a minute and half to print a document with text and small color graphic in normal mode, and around six and half minutes in best mode. Though slow in best mode, the print quality was really good. Line art and curve printing were pretty smooth with no broken or uneven lines. Full-page monochrome graphic took 40 seconds to print in normal mode, and gave some banding. In best mode, the time went up to 80 seconds, but the banding disappeared. For full-page color prints in normal mode, it took 2 minutes, but the quality was pretty good on plain paper, though not as good as the prints given by the Lexmark Z45 also reviewed in this issue. On photopaper, this printer gave impressive print quality in best mode, taking about 8 mins for the job. 

The Bottom Line: The best thing about this printer is its low price of Rs 3,950. Plus, the cost of its cartridges is also pretty low at Rs 470 for black and Rs 770 for color. These give a cost per print per page of Rs 1.42 in normal mode and 70 paisa in economy mode. The color cartridge gives an average cost per page of around Rs 4. 

Sukhsagar Prajapati at PCQ Labs