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Dell aims its V305W color inkjet multifunction printer ($130 as of August 4, 2008) at budget-constrained small-office users, stuffing it with a multitude of features for the price. Regrettably, a bear trap lies hidden in that low unit price: Very high ink costs overshadow this printer's many good attributes.

The V305W is well-equipped for a low-volume small or home office. It has integrated 802.11b/g wireless connectivity, a 100-sheet rear input slot, and a 25-sheet front output tray. It offers manual duplexing (two-sided printing) with helpful prompts. Two media-card slots let you work with photos easily. Dell bundles ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Sprint (a simple OCR package) and Dell Imaging Toolbox, which centralizes scanning, copying, and photo-editing features. The only thing I missed was an automatic document feeder (the similarly priced HP OfficeJet J4680 does offer that feature).

Dell put a lot of thought into the documentation: There's plenty of it, and it's extremely thorough. Though the company had some ups and downs on various criteria in our most recent Reliability and Service survey, its overall rating was average.

The control panel's layout, though very simple, has some quirks. You surf menu options, shown on the two-line OLED text display, using two navigation buttons and a third, big button labeled with a checkmark. The display also shows ink levels, but you can't tell which cartridge is which. It's also hard to guess how to wake up the printer; you're supposed to press an arrow button, but Dell doesn't document this explicitly.

In our tests, the Dell ranged from awesome to adequate. It blasted through plain-text documents at a rate of 10.7 pages per minute--more than twice as fast as Epson's Stylus NX400. The text itself was black and crisp. But when we sent color photos and other graphics through the pipeline, the V305W slowed considerably, to 1.2 ppm or less. Images printed on plain paper looked anemic; on Dell's own photo paper, the same images smoothed out and looked a little yellow, but had nice detail. Scan and copy quality were mediocre: dark, rough, and fuzzy.

The ink costs will make your jaw drop. The machine ships with a standard-size black cartridge and a tricolor cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridge. Each of these cartridges lasts for a mere 125 pages in a best-case scenario. The (relatively) high-yield versions of the cartridges offer little relief: A 210-page black cartridge costs $19, which translates into 9 cents per page, while the corresponding color cartridge costs $25 and last 190 pages, or 13.2 cents per page.

It's too bad about the inks, because the V305W is a nice printer in many ways. But even if you don't print all that much, you'll notice the dent in your wallet fairly quickly. And unfortunately, this printer doesn't print money.

Low-cost color inkjet multifunction printers like Epson's Stylus NX400 ($100 as of August 4, 2008) have to pack a lot of features into an affordable package. But something's got to give, and in the case of the Stylus NX400, the victim is text-printing speed. Still, matched against similarly priced models such as the HP Photosmart C4480, the NX400 is a better-balanced choice.

Overall, the Stylus NX400 has a good design. The roomy, 120-sheet rear input tray can handle many types of paper. The output tray is barely there--a series of thin, bendy plastic sections pull out from a front panel--but it's adequate, holding 30 sheets. The control panel includes nicely labeled buttons for copying, working with photos from a media card, or restoring scanned photos: Press a button, and task-specific options appear on the tiltable, 2.5-inch color LCD. Helpful cues make navigation easier.

The photo-restoration feature is interesting: You load photo paper in the machine, place a discolored photo on the scanner plate, and press the Photo button. The Stylus NX400 automatically scans the photo, fixes color flaws, and prints out a restored version. It doesn't send a digital version of the restored photo to your computer, but if you restore the photo using Epson's installed software on your computer, you can save the restored image as a file.

The Stylus NX400's performance in our speed and output quality tests varied. Text printed on plain paper came out very slowly--5 pages per minute (ppm). On the other hand, graphics pages came out as quickly as 3.4 ppm. On plain paper, text looked a little fuzzy, but nicely black. Graphics looked grainy, but nicely colored. Printed on Epson's own photo paper, the same graphics looked smoother. A routine copy of a plain-text document looked fine, but color scans looked dark and, in some samples, a little rough.

As is often true of low-cost inkjet printers, replacement ink is expensive. The machine ships with four standard-size cartridges--one black, plus cyan, magenta, and yellow. If you buy the three-color multi-pack, each color cartridge costs about $12.34 (which works out to 3.7 cents per page each at Epson's specified yields, for a total of 11.1 cents per page for all three colors). The high-yield (385-page) black cartridge is pricey, too, at $20 (or 5.2 cents per page).

Epson gets some of the unit's details wrong. For example, the Stylus NX400's rear USB port is very difficult to see. The documentation does not provide a thorough overview of the control panel, and a survey of the printer's parts is hidden in the troubleshooting section. Epson logged an average overall score in our most recent Reliability and Service survey.

If you're printing out your novel, don't get the Epson Stylus NX400: its text speed is way too slow and its ink prices too high. But in most other respects, it's as good as or better than its peers. Bargain-hunting users should be pleased.