One of the main differences between a printer for home use small business use is print speed. While everybody wants their prints through as fast as possible, for a business proprietor that dependancy is heightened. Fortunately , this printer is fast and pretty impressive . Shall I stop there? No, I will go on .
The Epson Stylus Office BX610FW is a surprisingly neat small machine with an attractive textured plastic top, including an embossed design? of dots. Its gentle wave shape folds down as you open the 30-sheet Automatic paper Feeder (ADF) and the only paper feed tray opens up at the back , with a telescopic paper support pulling up.
The control panel hinges open to a choice of four positions. The controls are very straightforward , with built in 62 mm colour screen , there are numerous navigation keys and a numeric keypad for use with the built in fax machine. There is a large Start button which caters for both black and colour printing.
There are two memory card slots and a PictBridge socket, so cameras and usb drives can be used without switching on the PC . On the back of the machine there are usb and ethernet sockets and a phone line in socket.
The machine supports wireless connection allowing the printer to be placed away from the desk giving more room if required,and the setup for this is very straightforward, set up is done via a wizard that automatically starts and handles the relevant security protocols easily.
Set up of the Epson Stylus Office BX610FW is basically as simple as installing the cartridges and follow the prompts to do a head clean and calibration page.
Print speeds have in recent years been highly ambitious with Epson quoting speeds in draft mode, which give poor results.However with this machine, Epson now cite speeds when used in normal mode, so on paper they may not look as good as some other models. But our results were impressive. We managed 12 pages per minutes for our 5 page text document, and 14 pages per minutes with our bigger document. This 14 page is not far off the 15 pages per minute quoted by Epson
Copy speeds are also very good with a single-page, colour copy taking 20 seconds. photograph prints were all high quality , colours were lifelike and sharp. This Epson printer is not meant to be a photo printer, but it did a great job as far as I am concerned.
Epson Ink cartridges are expensive, we find that good quality well-matched cartridges offer superior value for money and we recommend ink cartridges from www.firstinkjets.co.uk .
Verdict
The Stylus Office BX610FW sure as shooting has the speed required for an office printer. The print quality is not up to that of a laser printer (although speed wise it was better than many budget lasers), but for general day to day office use, We cannot find fault. Excellent all round printer .
