Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4720DWF
Speed is variable, but this user-friendly inkjet MFP delivers good cloud features and low running costs
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £101 exc VAT from pcpro.link/279eps
If you’re short on office space, Epson’s WorkForce Pro WF-4720DWF could be the MFP for you: it packs all the key features into a compact footprint, measuring around 43 x 38cm. Combining print, copy, scan and fax functions, it claims speeds of 20ppm for mono and colour and, at £101, it’s very affordable.
It’s cheap to run too, thanks to Epson’s high-capacity “35XL” cartridges. These deliver laser-beating running costs of 1.8p for a mono page and only 6.3p for a colour one. The standard “35” cartridges cost less up front, but per-page printing costs will end up being much higher.
Epson’s software installer provides a handy network setup tutorial, and loaded all Windows 10 drivers for us. It then found and applied the latest firmware, installed a browser print plugin, plus desktop scan and fax utilities, and checked for updates.
The routine also helpfully sets up the printer’s USB host port as a mapped drive in Windows Explorer, so you can scan directly to a flash drive or copy resident files from it, over the network, straight to your PC. With the Epson Event Manager loaded on our Windows 10 desktops, we could also select any of them from the control panel as a scan destination.
After a quick nozzle test page to confirm that our cartridges were working properly, we embarked on our regular speed and quality tests. Performance turned out to be a mixed bag. In Draft mode, our 20-page mono Word document was dished out at 21ppm, and switching to Standard mode only slowed it down to 20ppm. In high-quality mode, though, speed tumbled to 5ppm.
Similarly, our 24-page colour DTP document printed at 19ppm in Standard mode, but plummeted to 4.4ppm in high-quality. Photo printing was predictably the slowest of all: the WF-4720DWF took 112 seconds to render a high-quality A4 photo on glossy 141gsm paper.
As usual, switching to duplex mode reduces print speeds by around half – a double-sided print of our 20-page document averaged 11ppm. It’s noisy too, as the printer mechanically snatches pages back to reverse them. Copy speeds were merely average: a ten-page single-sided copy took 55 seconds to process, and since the scanner only has a simplex ADF, you can’t scan both sides of a page in a
“It took mere seconds for us to create a shortcut for scanning directly to Google Drive, which then appeared in the control panel”
single pass.
In terms of print quality, the WorkForce Pro acquits itself quite well. For everyday office printing on standard 75gsm paper, the Standard mode is clear enough for 12pt text – although a slight dusting starts to impede readability if you go smaller, even in high-quality mode. Using heavier 100gsm paper produced sharper results, so you may want to factor that into your running costs.
And printing colour marketing material in high-quality mode gave us bold, punchy reports without a hint of banding. Colour photos on glossy paper come out sharp and clean too, with no edge bleeding. There’s even a driver option for borderless prints.
The printer supports both wired and wireless connections, although you can’t use both at the same time. We had no problems printing from our iPad over AirPrint and Wi-Fi Direct, and you can also use Epson’s own iPrint iOS app to send files to the printer from Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive accounts, as well as keeping a remote eye on consumables.
Epson’s Connect software also lets remote users email print jobs as attachments directly to the printer. And it took mere seconds for us to create a shortcut for scanning directly to Google Drive, which then instantly appeared in the control panel.
Small businesses on a tight budget will like the WF-4720DWF, as it’s cheap and offers plenty of features. It’s not the fastest MFP there is, for either printing or scanning, but graphics and photo prints look great – and it’s very user-friendly.
SPECIFICATIONS
4,800 x 1,200dpi A4 inkjet MFP 1,200 x 2,400dpi colour flatbed A4 scanner 20ppm mono/colour 6.8cm colour touchscreen 2 x USB 2 10/100 Ethernet 802.11n wireless
NFC 33.6Kbps fax/modem 2 x RJ-11 duplex 250-sheet input tray 35-page ADF
maximum monthly duty cycle, 25,000 pages 425 x 378 x 249mm (WDH) 9.1kg 1yr RTB warranty
RUNNING COSTS (EXC VAT)
35XL cartridges: mono (2.6K pages), £46 C, Y, M (1.9K pages), £28 each maintenance box (50K pages), £18. Overall cost per A4 page: mono, 1.8p; colour, 6.3p