Epson BX305FW Ink Review

Inkjet printers have got a poor status for business printing. Dash a highlighter pen across a key phrase of text and you're likely to end up getting a smudgy mess. A couple of raindrops may make ink-printed envelopes almost unintelligible. Colour laser printers make a feasible alternative however they are usually big, hefty and also pricey, and so what's the alternative? Epson bridges the space between standard inkjet and laser printing using its resin-based DURABrite Ultra inks, that are virtually dry as soon as they go to the paper and are amazingly resilient to water, smudging as well as fading.

As an all-in-one printer intended for the small or home office, the BX305FW has a great deal of business-like attributes. In standalone mode, it is able to cope with mono or colour photocopying at the touch of a button and yet, unlike the majority of multi-function machines, it adds faxing to its arsenal. Better yet, scanning, photocopying and faxing all reap the benefits of a 30-sheet ADF (Auto Document Feeder) to help make light of multi-sheet documents. There is additionally a neat and tidy row of assignable speed-dial buttons for five telephone numbers. You don't have to be attached to the printer either, as the Epson is fully Wi-Fi certified in addition to having a standard USB 2.0 port. An additional nice touch is you can fire off faxes from the BX305FW directly from your pc, without needing to print hard copies of the documents firstly. Whilst the on-board control interface is rather nice and tidy, using the Epson is not all plain sailing. There is merely a solitary, rear-mounted paper input tray, which sits vertically and will cater to close to 100 sheets of regular 80gsm paper. Because of this if you need to print on headed paper or envelopes, you need to swap the paper around each and every time, and the same is true of photo printing. Yet another frustration is that there is no USB port available for direct document printing out of flash drives, and also there are no memory card readers either. An auto-duplex facility might have been nice too, because the quickly dry resin-based inks are perfect for double-sided printing, however regretably you must switch every sheet over yourself.

Print rates of speed undoubtedly are a little bit poor for document printing, taking 14 seconds on a mono text page and 58 seconds with respect to a mixed text and colour graphics DTP page in our testing. On the plus side, the printer does not have to hold back for pages to dry when outputting multi-sheet documents, which in turn speeds things up in actual terms. Picture printing is rather slow, taking two minutes and 21 seconds for a 6 x 4-inch print in standard photo quality mode as well as over 12 minutes with regard to an A4 picture print with the highest quality setting. As a four-ink printer, picture quality is actually sacrificed however even with the lack of colour space, it really is particularly weak on glossy photo paper, though quite satisfactory on plain paper.

As a combined printer, photocopier and fax machine, the device makes good sense and its four Epson BX305FW printer ink cartridge DURABrite Ultra system makes for rugged prints which are water, smudge as well as fade-resistant on plain paper. It's good to be aware you'll be able to print out critical business documents and they are going to stay looking top notch.

The BX305FW functions fairly well with respect to simple printing, scanning, photocopying as well as faxing and its ULTRABrite Ultra inks make for impressively smudge-resistant prints. Nevertheless, it is lacking in several areas and a few additional features would have made it far more useful within the office.

Epson BX305FW printer ink cartridges are available here.