Epson B-310N Color Inkjet Printer

Small workgroups and small businesses will be pleased with the speed at which the Epson B-310N puts out pages; they'll also have few complaints about the quality of prints. It's on the high-side, in terms of price, for an inkjet printer--particularly with the price of color laser printers falling--but this printer also does a great job on photos and graphics, which not every laser printer does. Be prepared to sacrifice some desktop space, and to spend extra for the optional duplex unit.

When I pressed the Print button on my first test, the Epson B-310N Color Inkjet Printer didn't exact roar into life, and I sat back, expecting a lengthy warm-up time. But suddenly the printer came to life and shot out pages so fast that I was shocked--they came out almost as fast as from a laser printer (though with a great deal more noise). From the Power Save mode, first page out was about 17 seconds, and only a third of that time if the printer was ready to print. Even from Power Save mode, however, times were very good; a four-page PDF took an average of six seconds per page. Warmed up, the first page of a three-page Word document took only six seconds to come out, with pages coming out in about 3.5 seconds after that. Yep, it's that fast.

Speed is great, but if the quality is not great, who cares? Luckily, Epson doesn't have that problem with this printer. It uses proprietary DuraBrite ink that leaves color graphics looking clear and true. Black fonts at any size looked excellent and sharp, and I didn't notice any bleed into the paper that would roughen edges. It was about then I noticed that the printer is set by default to a Fast Print (I suppose it's the Draft Mode) setting. I switched that off, which added not more than a few seconds to the print time, and, to be honest, I could barely see the difference in quality, except that color graphics looked slightly better at slower speeds.

Despite being an office printer, the B-310N did a fantastic job on printing photos. And again, it was fast, with 4x6 photos coming out in under 40 seconds, using the handy rear paper tray. Paper handling is well done, with a huge paper cassette (holds up to 500 letter-size sheets) as well as a rear sheet feeder for photos, envelopes, labels, and so on. I was disappointed that there was no built-in duplexer (you can get one as an option), and no helpful pop-up hints on how to do it in manual mode (you have to reference the PDF manual to find out how to do it).

That highlights the weak points of the printer--there are very few built-in options that are starting to be taken for granted. There's no memory card slot, no copier or scanner, or option for wireless printing. That's too bad, since one or two of those options would add a lot of value to this high-end printer. Still, the quality is top notch and the speeds remarkable.

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