Epson seems to have taken a leaf out of Brother's book by hiding the USB cable inside the CX6600, or possibly Brother borrowed the idea from Epson. Either way we like anything that tidies up a printer, scanner or MFD but Epson has missed a trick as the mains cable sticks proudly out of the back of the CX6600, and there seems little point in tucking away one cable but not the other.

The CX6600 takes up more desk space than any other in this group, which is saying something as the Lexmark in particular is no shrinking violet, and in part this is due to the layout that Epson has used. The scanner lid is just a plain hinged flap so all of the controls are on the front of the CX6600 with the card reader beneath that.

The paper tray sticks out of the back but curiously the paper output tray is so short that paper soon starts to either fall to the floor or to get jammed. Someone has made an effort to tidy the Epson up so it is quite inoffensive despite its huge bulk, but you'd be hard pressed to describe it as attractive.

Setting the CX6600 up and getting it ready for use is a long winded job as you have to install the four ink tanks and then run through the manual print head alignment process which involves five sheets of outputs. Considering that most MFDs and printers manage this task automatically with a single sheet of paper, it's safe to say that Epson has some ground to make up.

Generally we would expect an Epson machine to excel at photo printing but the quality was poor on normal settings, and it was surprisingly tricky to force the settings to photo quality. We had to use the Epson PhotoQuicker utility and that sorted out the quality issue, however the print speed was very slow.

On the plus side, copying pages of text, scanning photos, printing text and printing coloured PowerPoint slides all went smoothly, the speed was good, and so too was quality. We ended our time with the Epson feeling rather confused as it seems primarily to be a photo printer yet it is far too slow to fulfil that role.