If you are running a small business from home, chances are you would struggle to find space for a printer, scanner and copier, which makes the MFD (Multi-Function Device) a worthwhile investment if you need one or more of these functions.

Epson's new Stylus Photo RX500 takes the MFD a stage further by adding a photo-quality printer component to the mix, so it's equally suited to home photo printing use. It's easy to set up and use, once you've finished playing hunt-the-USB 2.0 port. The latter is located inside the printer, underneath the scan carriage, but to find this out you have to consult the manual; it's not even mentioned in the easy setup poster.

All the control buttons are on a well-designed and laid out control panel which has an LCD screen with the appropriate buttons to scroll through the menu. Directly under the control panel and set behind a small cover is the memory card reader. This supports the whole range of flash media currently available; Compact Flash I / II, xD Picture cards, SmartMedia, SD card, MMC, Microdrives and all forms of MemoryStick. As with most photo printers you don't have to switch on your PC to print from a memory card.

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A six-colour inkjet, the Stylus Photo RX500 uses individual ink cartridges (black, cyan, magenta, light cyan, light magenta and yellow) which should provide benefits in running costs. The print engine is rated at 17 pages per minute for monochrome pages and 16ppm for colour, but bear in mind that these figures are quoted for draft modes only.

Standard print quality pages will take longer to print; around 2.5ppm for standard A4 pages of monochrome text, but the quality of normal text is pretty average, nowhere near as good as the output when printing photos.

Where the Stylus Photo RX500 scores is with its photo printer elements. Not only can you scan a photo to your flash media and print borderless prints; Epson also supplies a grid so that you can scan slides and negatives. By using the included Easy PhotoFix software you can restore old slides and negatives back to near their original quality.

The Stylus Photo RX500 scans up to resolutions of 2400 x 4800dpi, with a maximum colour depth of 48-bit using a six-line colour CCD. Using the USB 2.0 interface, it's no slouch when doing so. Controlling where you want to send the scanned image is easy, using the Epson Smart Panel which gives you a host of options; scan to e-mail, memory card, fax, PDA, as well as the normal scan to OCR and image applications.

The Smart Panel also helps you to manage various tasks, from the simple - scanning a photo into an e-mail - through to more complicated stuff like making a greetings card from a scanned photo. The best of the interfaces, though, is the one used for copying, and anyone who has used an office photocopier will instantly recognise the layout and functions.

Epson supplies the Stylus Photo RX500 with a year's warranty, which is extendable using Epson's Coverplus extended warranty scheme.

Epson's Stylus Photo RX500 combines ease of use with good scan and photo print quality but this does come at the expense of slow print speeds and average quality when printing text. The fact that it can print directly from a whole host of flash media is another feather in its cap.