Epson Work Force WF-110
Portable printing with inkjet precision
The WF-110 is small and light for a batterypowered inkjet printer
£199 FROM Epson, epson.co.uk FEATURES AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Micro-USB
Epson’s smallest printer comes with inbuilt Wi-Fi and a Lithium-ion battery that you can charge over USB. Aimed at the business user, it’s built for portability and is certainly small and light for a battery-powered inkjet printer.
Apart from the power indicator LEDs, the controls and display are hidden and protected by an articulated flap. The display is no bigger than a postage stamp, but it’s full colour. It’s not a touchscreen, so you’ll need to use the cursor buttons beside it.
There are two sockets on the left side for the power adapter and a Micro-USB cable. The USB cable can transfer data and recharge the battery when you don’t have a mains connection. The battery charges in 2.5 hours through the mains and 10 hours over USB. What you won’t find, and which would have been useful, is a memory slot or a USB port for a flash memory drive.
Print options
You can print via USB, Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi Direct in mono or colour. You can print on a variety of media including envelopes, A4 to A6-size plain paper and glossy photo paper of varying formats, and the paper-in tray can hold 20 sheets of paper.
There’s no duplex printing. There’s also no NFC connectivity, and no ports for an SD Card, or USB thumb drive. And it cannot print on to speciality media such as card, or parcel labels.
It is able to print at a the surprisingly high resolution of 5,760x1,440. It does not print quickly though. Expect seven pages per minute in mono; 4ppm for colour. When you’re using the battery that print rate halves again to just 2ppm for colour pages.
The free Epson iPrint companion app allows you to ‘talk’ to your printer, and accepts voice-activated commands through Siri or Google Assistant.
In terms of setup, inputting the password via the tiny touchscreen is pretty awkward. Also, the drivers were not pre-installed on our MacBook, which meant downloading them from the Epson website.
Once up and running though, the printer coped with thick envelopes, and we experienced no paper jams or creased pages.
We were impressed by the clarity; mono tex appears to be uncompromised. Every character appears dark and well delineated. With graphics and photos too, detail is impressive. When it comes to filling block colour, however, the results are less consistent and individual colours are not as bright or vivid as other inkjets. Photos on photo paper appear sharp, but they also tend to have too much magenta and lack the finish achieved by Epson’s photo printers.
Printing is painfully slow, and we wouldn’t recommend the WF-110 for printing out long documents. You should also consider that the tiny inkjet cartridges are expensive.
Given its ability to print so reliably and with such detail and clarity, we’d recommend the WF-110 to anyone who needs to print documents where there might not be a power source. It’s really neat and the fact you can charge the battery over USB is a plus point for mobile use. JIM HILL