Epson WorkForce 60 Color Inkjet Printer

The Epson WorkForce 60 is a bare-bones color inkjet printer. It has very good print speeds at normal quality (and laser-like text at high quality printing), with handsome prints and very good photo quality. Wireless 802.11n is built in, as is a duplexer. Otherwise, you won't find any bells or whistles on this Epson Workforce, such as a scanner or copier, multiple paper trays, an automatic document feeder, or media-card slots. If you're all about speed, or need laser-like prints but don't want to pony up the extra money for a laser printer, you'll like the WorkForce 60. Otherwise, look around at other options.

The Epson WorkForce 60 is a bare-bones color inkjet printer. However, at its price range (around $100), it offers a few features that are much appreciated and even a bit surprising--built-in wireless and wired networking, and a built-in duplexer. By "bare bones" I mean that this the WorkForce 60 won't scan or copy or fax (even though it looks deceptively like an all-in-one); and there are no media-card slots or LCD display.

What it does is print and it does it well. Epson touts the WorkForce 60 as "the world's fastest two-sided printer" and having "laser-quality black text." Those two claims are a bit in opposition to each other when it comes to real-world testing. That is, you can get very good duplex prints quickly--about a minute for a four-page Word document--but that "laser-quality" text comes when you switch the print mode to a higher quality. That slows things down considerably; it took about 39 seconds for a single page to print at this quality. Duplex printing tends to soak a page with ink, leaving pages damp and floppy. It also typically takes a long time because the ink on one side needs to dry before the other can be printed. Epson's DURABrite Ultra ink dries instantly, however, and so duplex pages come out faster because there's no waiting for the ink to dry. Under a magnifying glass, the text (at the higher quality) does come close to rivaling a laser printer. At lower or draft quality, black text looks pretty average, though certainly acceptable.

Most home users are likely perfectly satisfied with normal, rather than high quality, prints, and the WorkForce 60 is indeed quick. A 43-page PDF took about 3:28 to print, averaging under five seconds per page. Again, at this quality level, fonts looked good but didn't quite rival laser texts (though the speed is certainly closing in on laser-printing speed). Color graphics looked good and I like that the ink doesn't bleed into the page.

As I've said before about Epson printers, color photos look particularly good. Images are sharp images and colors are nuanced and realistic. A 4x6 print took about a minute from start to finish, perfectly acceptable but not particularly fast. Prints do come out completely dry, not tacky at all, and as Epson press materials claim, the ink won't bleed or run even if it gets wet.

Caveats? Well, for about the same price range (and about the same size), you can pick up an all-in-one printer that may be slower and not deliver quite the quality, but you'll still get more for your money. If speed or laser-like quality in an inkjet printer are your main concerns, you'll like the WorkForce 60. If print quality is not such an issue, and you prefer to get a copier and scanner included, take a look at the rest of Epson's line of printers.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.