Epson WorkForce 600 All-in-One Printer

This Epson WorkForce 600 All-in-One Printer got extremely high marks for its ease of use and thoughtful small touches, such as the tiltable control panel. The "microbusinesses" that are the intended market will find it an excellent tool, since quality is high and it's fairly fast. However, since the ink tanks seem to drain fairly fast as well, make sure you either use the "draft" printing for less-important prints or keep a few extra tanks on hand.

Speed, quality, and efficiency; if you have a home office or run what Epson refers to as a "microbusiness" (that is, a business with up to five employees), those are going to be the advantages you seek when you buy an all-in-one printer. And this Epson WorkForce 600 All-in-One Printer has speed, quality, and efficiency to spare.

Monochrome pages, at normal quality, zipped out in about four seconds each, with the first page out in 11 seconds. Color graphics pages took roughly 11 seconds each, with the first page out in about 28 seconds. Even very large (72-point) fonts were crisp and clear, with very little bleeding into the (cheap) copy paper or rough edges. Print quality may not be quite the "laser quality" that the press materials boast, but honestly, they're not too far off either.

Part of that may be due to Epson's DURABrite inks. These offer some distinct advantages when printing text, graphics, and photos. For one thing, the ink stands up to a highlighter, which most of us know is not the case with lots of inkjet prints. Epson claims the ink will resist fading many times longer than competitors' inks; that's not something can easily test, but I will compare my prints with other prints over time to see if there's a discernible difference. Using Epson paper made prints look even better.

One fun test was to see if the photo prints were as waterproof as Epson claims. I printed a 4x6 test picture (which, for some reason, took nearly four minutes to print at normal quality) and it came out dry, as advertised. I then ran the photo under water, and there was no smudging. Careful how you dry that water, though; I wiped it off with a tissue, which put some big scratches across the photo.

Scanning and copying worked easily and well; a one-page color graphic took 42 seconds to scan to a PDF, using the convenient Epson Scan facility.