Epson Workforce Pro WF-8010DW

A bigger colour printer

A beast of a printer that lags behind the pack

Why pay £348 for an office inket printer? Well, this one takes paper up to A3 size (twice as big as A4). On top of that, Epson claims speeds of up to 34 pages per minute (ppm), making this a potential alternative to a colour laser printer. A set of toner cartridges alone for a laser printer could cost you more, and A3 models are over £500 to buy. As Epson points out, the inkjet also uses far less power and avoids that photocopier ozone smell.

Living up to its business-like design, the WF-8010DW’S ‘maximum duty cycle’ – the number of pages it’s intended to print per month without keeling over – is 65,000. That’s more than the entire planned life of some budget laser printers. It takes XL cartridges, which are rated for 4,000 colour or 5,000 mono pages – this compares to the few hundred of a typical home inkjet refill. A standard colour page works out at a very reasonable 4p, and a mono page only a penny. The paper tray at the bottom takes 250 sheets (you can expand this to 1,750), and the rear slot, which in other printers might feed just one sheet at a time, accepts 80, up to A3+ size and 256gsm card thickness.

In theory, then, this is a bit of a beast. In use, not quite so much. Curiously, while claiming 34ppm, Epson quotes an ISO figure (in compliance with the methods of the International Standards Organisation) of only 24ppm. However, the fastest we could print a mono text document (in Economy mode) was 22pm; at Best quality this dropped to 12.5.

Both were noticeably noisy, and duplexing (printing both sides) added to the racket, managing 16ppm. An A3 poster took 16 seconds to print on plain paper, and on glossy photo paper at maximum quality we waited two minutes nine seconds, but it was worth it for the crisp results. Business graphics looked great too, and black-and-white photos came out well using the High quality setting.

With full Wi-fi support as well as Gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0, this could be a practical choice for a busy office or jobs like newsletter publishing, but you wouldn’t have to be in too much of a hurry.

A big, practical printer for A3 and A4 output, but it’s expensive and not as quick as it claims