Epson Stylus Office BX625FWD

If you're not familiar with Epson's printers, then you might now know that its 'Stylus Office' range is mostly aimed at business users. 

This new 4-in-1 has got everything a small business might need—on paper at least.  It prints, scans, copies and faxes, and also offers double-sided printing and Ethernet and WiFi connections to allow several different users to print at once.

Epson also boasts fast, professional-quality printing.
 
Hardware

When we unpacked the BX625FWD, our first reaction was to notice how many buttons there are on the front!  As you can see from the photo below, the 2.5'' screen is crowded out by a range of controls.  We've got used to touchscreen interfaces and we now expect to be able to manage any printer with our fingertips.  The huge set of buttons obviously makes it less straightforward, but Epson has chosen a clear, sensible layout for these controls.

The front loader holds thirty sheets, while the main paper drawer can hold up to 250 pages.

Open it up, and you'll find four DURABrite Ultra cartridges, which are guaranteed to produce water-resistant documents that don't fade.  Two different sizes are available, standard and extra large.


Speeds: fast office printing

For traditional office documents, the BX625FWD deserves four stars.  Epson claims that it can manage 15 pages per minute (ppm) in black and white and 7 ppm in colour, and our test results did even better than those figures, give or take 2 or 3 ppm.  We managed 18 ppm in black and white and 9 ppm in colour, which is very fast for an inkjet and comparable to a five-star printer like the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901.  The BX625FWD is also very responsive: it takes just 9 seconds to print the first page of your documents (see inset).

Quality

The outlines of characters in printed text aren't always very even, and graphs could do with more detail and sharpness.  In black and white, blocks of colour don't really do a very good job of demonstrating the gradient.  The individual ink drops are very visible in both modes.

We also decided to take a look at the quality of the photos that we tried.  This is a printer that's not really designed for photo printing, but it still manages to do a pretty good job.  Colours are reproduced accurately and the quality is more than acceptable.  Have a look at the Face-Off, where you can compare it to an Epson Stylus Photo printer, which, as the name suggests, is very much designed with photos in mind: the Stylus Office isn't quite as good, but has nothing to be ashamed of either.

Scanner and copier: fast

The scanner is fast: it takes 9 seconds to do a pre-scan, and then 5 seconds to scan at 75 dpi or 9 seconds at 300 dpi.

The results are better than what we've seen from the majority of other scanners.  Some detail is lost, but the whole thing is generally pretty accurate and well above average.  Compare it to the Kodak ESP7250, which, despite also having a 2400 dpi CIS scanner, can't hope to compete.

Copies are speedy too: you can count on just 8 seconds for a black and white document.  You have to wait a little longer (29 seconds) in colour.  The results are a long way behind what you can expect from the scanner.  The black and white copy we made of our test graphic was well below par, with weak contrast and text that disappears amongst the individual ink drops and ends up unreadable.  It's best to stick to copying text documents, which is much more acceptable.

Energy Consumption and Noise

Our tests confirmed the energy consumption listed by Epson in the technical specs: 3.2 W on standby, which we think is pretty high compared to some of the competition which easily falls below 1 W—especially given that most printers are on standby the vast majority of the time.  When printing, it reaches 15 W, which makes it rather efficient.

It's pretty quiet with an average noise level of 49 dB(A).

Cost per page: 5.6 p

At 5.6 p per page, the running costs are well below average.  Make sure you use an XL cartridge: they're slightly more expensive to buy, but work out cheaper in the long run.  Better still, Epson ships the BX625FWD with full cartridges (and not the 'starter' cartridges some manufacturers give you)—and XL ones at that.

ISO Lifespan using XL cartridges