The Epson Stylus C62 is the type of printer that you are likely to find bundled with a new PC. In fact you're most likely to get its baby brother, the C44UX, which sells for under £40, so if you found a C62 in the box you may consider yourself lucky.

Unfortunately we'd have to disagree as we found the C62 to be an unimpressive printer. To start with, it's relatively slow and it lost out to the i320 in every test. In addition it annoyed us with the behaviour of its chipped Epson ink cartridges.

You may not know about these nasty little devices. Epson disapproves of you using non-Epson replacement cartridges, or refilling your cartridges with after-market ink. To prevent this it puts a chip in each cartridge that monitors how much work the printer has done, and it then calculates how much ink is left in the cartridge. When it decides that the cartridge is empty it stops printing until it detects a new cartridge and chip.

If the colour cartridge has 'run out' (it may have some ink left) and you want to print a monochrome text document, forget about it. You need a new genuine Epson colour cartridge before the printer will work. Note that it will cost you around £47 to change the cartridges in this £61 printer.

There is one feature of the C62 that could make it desirable, as it has both parallel and USB ports, so it could be suitable for owners of older PCs.

In terms of print quality, the Canon i320 and this C62 are very similar, but as the Canon is faster and cheaper it is hard to work out why you would want to buy the Epson C62.