Epson WorkForce 310 Color Inkjet Printer

The Epson WorkForce 310 is a good entry-level all-in-one printer. The company's DURABrite inks are immediately dry to the touch even when printing photos (and won't smudge even if wet), and the colors look very good considering the low cost of the printer. It's fairly fast (except when printing photos) with up to 36 pages per minute in some print modes (competitive with laser printers); that, and the low price, and the printer's built-in networking capability, make this Epson printer a decent choice for small / home businesses. Still, there are some cheaper deals on decent all-in-one printers.

Manufacturers of color inkjet printers need to look for any advantage to distinguish their entry-level units from other printers with similar prices and functionality. Finding these distinctions is often a case of noticing what's not included rather than what is. This Epson printer includes a lot of great functionality, with only a few missing pieces.

What are those missing pieces? A built-in duplexer and a tiltable LCD screen, perhaps.

But what's included in the WorkForce 310 is excellent. First, I have had great experiences with the company's DURABrite inks, which come out dry to the touch, don't soak deeply even in cheap copy paper, and give decent-to-excellent color prints (photos benefit the most from these inks). Epson compares its monochrome print speeds as well as its quality with laser printers, and (after a much-needed print-head alignment after the first try) it's not far off.

The WorkForce 310 is indeed fast, with monochrome text pages coming out in an average of about four seconds, and with four graphics-intensive pages taking about 30 seconds each. As with other Epson printers I've tested, color prints look great but take a lot of time to print--a 4x6 photo took over three minutes, a lot longer than with, say, the Canon Pixma 3300, which is a fair bit cheaper as well.

One great thing about this printer is that it uses two black ink tanks, which allows a lot more printing in between changing cartridges (assuming that most people print more monochrome than color pages).