I've been using printers of many kinds for more years than I care to remember. Suffice to say, I once owned a Daisy Wheel printer :). In recent years I have mostly purchased Epsons for my ink jet needs (higher end photo printing and printing on CDs) because I'm comfortable with their software interface, I like the individual replaceable ink tanks and the products have generally worked well for me. The water resistance of Epson's current DuraBright inks is also a big plus to me.
When the Amazon Vine program offered my a WorkForce 30 to review I jumped on it. The main selling point of this printer is the idea that it can be just as fast as a small laser printer. I was quite skeptical of this claim, so I set about testing it in my own environment. I'm using a 2-3 year old Dual Processor XP based system, which is pretty middle of the road for modern systems. Pretty good hardware, but certainly not the latest and greatest.
My everyday workhorse printer is an aging HP LaserJet 3150 combination printer, fax & monochrome scanner. For my test I pulled up two typical documents in Microsoft Word 2003. Document one was a three page primarily text instructional document with a number of photographic illustrations mixed in. On this test document my 3150 laser printer took 46 seconds start to finish to print one copy while the WorkForce 30 took almost twice as long at about 80 seconds.
For the second test I opened a four page all text document in Arial 12 point font. The laser printer took 54 seconds to crank this one out while is a similar time per page as for the mixed text/graphics document. However, on this text only document the WorkForce 30 trounced the laser printer by clocking only 30 seconds to output the same four pages. Text quality from the WorkForce 30 was very good, but close examination still gives the quality edge to the old laser printer. Unless you are comparing the two side by side you would probably never know the difference.
Water resistance of both the laser and the WorkForce 30 output was excellent. I put sheets from both under running water in our bathroom sink. The paper got soggy and fell apart before the ink could degrade. Horrible water resistance has been the bane of most ink jet output for a very, very long time; I'm glad to see that Epson has licked the water problem.
If very fast text printer at a low price is important to you, then this printer might be the ticket. Water resistant output is a huge benefit as well. Besides the fast text output, it does everything one would expect an ink jet printer in this class to do. Changing just one ink cartridge at a time saves money. I'll never have another printer which uses "color" print cartridges with tiny amounts of each color all bound up into one unit. My last HP ink jet went to an early grave because it was absurdly expensive to run.
I would think that college students dashing out the door at the last minute to hand in a paper will appreciate the speed and low running costs of this unit, and the ability the ability to deal with liquids!
Hint: If you have this printer, buy the "high capacity" # 68 refills, not the low capacity # 69 refills.
By the way, this makes an absolutely killer check printer for use with QuickBooks. Spits the things out so fast it is almost scary. Watch the money fly out the door ...
Get more detail about Epson WorkForce 30 Color Printer (Black) (C11CA19201).
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