Epson Expression Premium XP-610 Small-In-One Printer

Pros Fast for its price. Above-par photo quality. Can print on optical media. Prints from and scans to memory cards and USB thumb drives. Solid wireless printing choices.

Cons Low paper capacity. No Ethernet. Bottom Line The Epson Expression Premium XP-610 is a compact and speedy inkjet MFP with good photo quality and a solid set of home-centered features.

By Tony Hoffman

The Epson Expression Premium XP-610 Small-in-One Printer ($149.99) is a compact inkjet multifunction printer (MFP) geared toward home users. It offers good speed and solid output quality with better-than-average photos, plus a largely consumer-centered feature set.

Design and Features
Measuring 5.4 by 15.4 by 13.4 inches (HWD), the XP-610 and weighs 21.5 pounds. There's a 100-sheet main tray and a 20-sheet photo paper tray, plus an auto-duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. The modest paper capacity is fine for home use, but it falls short of what you'd need for the printer to perform double duty in a home and home office.

On top of this MFP is a letter-sized flatbed for copying or scanning. The front panel houses a 2.5-inch LCD surrounded by touch controls. To the side of the paper trays are the memory-card slot (SD or MS Duo), and a port for a USB thumb drive.

The XP-610 prints, copies, and scans, and can do so without connecting to a computer, and it can print onto inkjet-printable DVDs or CDs. It can also print from or scan to a USB flash drive or memory card, and scan to a computer or a network folder.

You get USB and Wi-Fi connectivity (including Wi-Fi Direct, which allows a direct peer-to-peer connection with a compatible device without the need for a network), but there's no Ethernet port. It's compatible with AirPrint and Google Cloud Print, and with Epson Connect features such as the iPrint app for iOS and Android devices. I tested the printer over a USB connection with the driver installed on a PC running Windows Vista.

Print Speed
The Epson XP-610 handled our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at 4.9 effective pages per minute (ppm). It's considerably faster than the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma MX922 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer (2.4ppm), which, despite its name, is packed with home-friendly, as well as business-oriented, features. The XP-610 averaged 1 minute 8 seconds in printing out 4 by 6 photos, a good score and just a touch slower than the Canon MX922 (1:05).

Output Quality
Overall output quality is average for an inkjet. Text quality is suitable for most home use, with the exception of documents with which you want to make a good visual impression, like resumés.

Graphics quality is typical of inkjets. Most images showed dithering in the form of graininess and dot patterns in my test prints. Some very thin, colored lines were nearly invisible, and white type on a black background looked degraded at smaller sizes. Graphics quality is good enough for PowerPoint handouts for general use, though not for formal reports and the like.

Photos are above par. A monochrome photo showed some tinting, and several prints showed dithering (graininess), but most were at least the same quality as you'd expect from drugstore prints.

This printer employs five ink cartridges, including a photo black. Its running costs of 4.6 cents per black-and-white page and 13.3 cents per color page (based on Epson's figures for the prices and yields of its most economical ink cartridges) are typical for an inkjet at its price.

The XP-610 sits between the Epson Expression Home XP-410 and the Epson Expression Premium XP-810 in the company's Small-in-One line. The Epson XP-410 is strictly for home use, and lacks the XP-610's auto-duplexer, slot for a USB thumb drive, photo tray. The Epson XP-810 adds business-friendly features, such as fax capability, an Ethernet port, and an automatic document feeder (ADF). Neither of them could approach the XP-610's tested speed (4.9ppm) in printing from business apps, with the Epson XP-810 testing at 3.6ppm and the Epson XP-410 limping in at 2.6ppm.

Conclusion
The Epson Expression Premium XP-610 Small-in-One Printer is not as versatile as the Canon Pixma MX922 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer, our Editors' Choice for budget home inkjet MFPs. That said, the XP-610 could be used in a home-office in a pinch, but the lack of some business-friendly features such as fax, Ethernet, ADF, and adequate paper capacity make it a less than ideal choice in that regard. It is much faster than the Canon MX922, and speedier than either the Epson XP-410 or Epson XP-810. Although printing speed is seldom as critical a factor for home or for home-office use as it is for larger businesses, faster is still better. The Epson Expression Premium XP-610 Small-in-One Printer is not only speedy, but adds good photo quality and a solid feature set to the mix.

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Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit Premium

Pros Shields browsers, Java, Office documents, PDF readers, and media players against exploits. Needs no signatures. Small and lightweight. Proved effective in testing.

Cons Difficult to demonstrate its effectiveness. Bottom Line Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit Premium shields your system against exploit attacks, even never-before-seen zero-day attacks. Add this new layer of protection to your security arsenal.

By Neil J. Rubenking

A Symantec VP recently proclaimed that antivirus is dead. Many would disagree, but it's true that a traditional antivirus utility can't protect against zero-day exploits that attack vulnerabilities in the operating system and applications. That's where Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit Premium ($24.95) comes in. It's specifically designed to detect and repulse exploit attacks, and it has no need for prior knowledge of the exploit in question.

Because there's no signature database, the product is quite small, just 3MB. There's also no need for regular updates. A free edition, called Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit Free, injects its protective DLL into popular browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera) and Java. The Premium edition, reviewed here, extends this protection to Microsoft Office applications and to popular PDF readers and media players. With the Premium edition, you can add custom shields for other programs, too.

How It Works
According to the documentation, Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit Premium "wraps protected applications in three defensive layers." The first layer of this patent-pending protection system watches for attempts to bypass OS security features, including Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). Layer two keeps an eye on memory, in particular for any attempt to execute exploit code from memory. The third layer blocks attacks on the protected application itself, including "sandbox escapes and memory mitigation bypasses."

This all sounds good. It would be pretty tough for any attacker to exploit a vulnerable program without hitting one of these tripwires. The only problem is, it's awfully hard to see this protection in action.

Tough to Test
Most antivirus, suite, and firewall products that include exploit protection handle it much the way they do antivirus scanning. For each known exploit, they generate a behavioral signature that can detect the exploit at the network level. When I tested Norton AntiVirus (2014) using exploits created by the CORE Impact penetration tool, it blocked every single one and reported the precise CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Explosures) number for many of them.

McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2014 caught about 30 percent of the attacks but only identified a handful by CVE name. Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014 caught a bit over half, identifying most as "dangerous pages."

The thing is, most of those exploits probably couldn't have done any damage even if not blocked by Norton. Typically an exploit works against a very specific version of a particular program, relying on widespread distribution to ensure it hits enough vulnerable systems. I like the fact that Norton lets me know some site attempted an exploit; I won't go there again! But most of the time the detected exploit couldn't have actually done any damage.

Malwarebytes' protection gets injected into each protected application. Unless an actual exploit attack targets the precise version of that application, it does nothing at all. A testing tool supplied by the company verified that the software works, and an analysis tool I used showed that the Malwarebytes DLL had been injected into all the protected processes. But where's my hands-on verification that it will block a real-world exploit?

Commissioned Test
Because it's so hard to test this product, Malwarebytes engaged the services of a security blogger known only as Kafeine. Kafeine attacked a test system using 11 widespread exploit kits: Angler EK, Fiesta, FlashPack, Gondad, GrandSoft, HiMan EK, Infinity, Magnitude, Nuclear Pack, Styx, and Sweet Orange. In each case, he tried several variations on the basic attack.

While this test did reveal one bug in the product, once that bug was fixed it made a clean sweep. In every case it detected and prevented the exploit attack. You can view the full report on Kafeine's blog, Malware don't need Coffee.

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