Epson Expression Home XP-440 Small-in-One Printer Review (2024)

Hence the name, the Epson Expression Home XP-440 Small-in-One Printer ($99.99) is a very compact home all-in-one printer that offers good overall output quality and a wide range of connectivity features. It may not be the smallest home AIO on the market (that honor goes to the HP Deskjet 3755 All-in-One Printer), but it is more versatile than its tinier competition. Although it doesn't unseat the Canon Pixma TS8020 as our top all-in-one geared toward home use, it offers the same solid performance and feature set I have come to expect from Epson's Small-in-One line at a very reasonable price.

Diminutive Design

The glossy-black XP-440 ($519.99 at Amazon) measures 5.4 by 15.4 by 11.8 inches (HWD) when closed and 11 by 15.4 by 20.4 inches (HWD) with trays extended, and it weighs just 9 pounds, the same weight and dimensions as its identical-looking predecessor, the now discontinued Epson Expression Home XP-430. The Editors' Choice Canon Pixma TS8020 has similar dimensions but is heavier, at 14 pounds. The HP Deskjet 3755 measures 5.6 by 15.9 by 7 inches when closed (the XP-440 is nearly 5 inches deeper), 10.4 by 15.9 by 17.8 inches with trays extended, and weighs a featherweight 5.1 pounds.

The tilt-up control panel above the output tray houses a 2.7-inch non-touch color LCD, flanked by a four-way controller with central OK button, plus buttons with icons for Home, Start, and Backspace. The XP-440 has a rear-loading paper feeder that fits up to 100 sheets of plain paper or 20 sheets of photo paper. This relatively sparse paper capacity pegs the XP-440 for home use but is less than what we'd consider suitable for a home office. Unlike the Canon TS8020 , it lacks an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper.

As is typical of budget home all-in-ones, the XP-440 prints, copies, and scans, but doesn't fax. The XP-440 lacks an automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning or copying multipage documents unattended, another feature frequently left off of budget home machines. The flatbed scanner can scan or copy at up to letter size. A memory-card reader accepts cards in the SD family.

The XP-440 can connect to a computer via USB (but not Ethernet), to a network by 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, or make a direct peer-to-peer connection with a compatible device via Wi-Fi Direct. It is Apple AirPrint compatible, Mopria-certified for easy printing to Android devices, and supports Google Cloud Print. It also supports the suite of Epson Connect software solutions including Email Print, Epson Creative Print, Epson iPrint, Epson Remote Print, and Epson Scan to Cloud. I tested it over a USB connection with the driver installed on a PC running Windows 10 Professional.

Printing Speed

I timed the XP-440 in the text (Word) portion of our business applications suite at 7.3 pages per minute (ppm), a bit short of its rated speed (10ppm) but still within striking distance. On our full business suite—which in addition to the aforementioned Word document includes documents with photos and graphics as well as text—I clocked it at an average of 4ppm. One of the few differences between the XP-440 and the XP-430 is a modest boost in rated speed to 10ppm for printing in black from the XP-430's 9ppm, but I cannot compare them directly because we tested the XP-430 using our old regimen on a Windows Vista machine. The Canon TS8020 was considerably faster in printing our Word document (11.4ppm) and a more speedy (4.4ppm) in printing out the whole suite. The HP Deskjet 3755 ($184.99 at Amazon) was considerably slower, at 4.3ppm for the Word document and just 1.2ppm for the whole suite.

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A Wiz at Text and Graphics Printing

Text quality in my testing was above par for an inkjet, fine for most home, school, or business correspondence including resumes but short of what you'd want for demanding desktop publishing applications.

Graphics quality was above par for an inkjet, good enough for business use up to and including PowerPoint handouts, even ones going to important clients. Many backgrounds showed mild banding, a regular pattern of faint striations, but not to the level where anyone but an acute perfectionist (or reviewer) is likely to notice.

Photo quality was slightly subpar for an inkjet. There was some loss of detail in brighter areas in several prints, and I noticed posterization—abrupt shifts in color where they should be gradual. There was an obvious tint in our monochrome test.

As the base model in Epson's Small-in-One line, the XP-440 employs four ink tanks. A higher-end (and more photo-centric) model, the Epson Expression Premium XP-640 Small-in-One Printer ($289.00 at Amazon) , uses five ink tanks, including a photo black, and had considerably better photo quality in our testing.

Epson doesn't quote cost-per-page figures for its printers, but based on the price and yield figures of their most cost-effective cartridges, the running costs work out to 6.2 cents per monochrome page and 18.2 cents per color page. This is considerably more than the Canon Pixma TS8020's 4.1 cents per black page and 12.7 cents per color page. The XP-440's ink costs are somewhat less than the HP Deskjet 3755 All-in-One Printer (8.7 cents per black page and 19 cents per color page), if you were to buy HP's highest-capacity cartridges individually. Many people buying that model would likely opt to join HP's Instant Ink subscription program, which can offer substantial cost savings, particularly for color pages.

Conclusion

The Epson Expression Home XP-440 Small-in-One Printer offers a basic feature set for home printing, with modest paper capacity and lacking more office-centric features like an ADF, an auto-duplexer, and fax capabilities. It has solid print speed, and good text and graphics quality (although it came up a bit short in its photo-printing acumen.) It may no longer be the smallest home all-in-one, as the XP-430 arguably was, but it's better rounded than the HP 3755 (and considerably faster). You'll pay more up front for the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma TS8020, but it will give you better photo quality. The XP-440 might save you room on your desk, but, with its relatively high running costs, it might cost more than the Canon model in the long run.