Epson WorkForce 600
Rating: 
(4 / 5)
I setup my Epson the same way I did the HP. I just took it out of the box and tried to put it on the network. Unfortunately I was slapped in the face pretty early by the interface. I’m not sure that Epson put a lot of effort into making sure users had a complete experience at the console because a lot of the menus are hard to figure out and they’re just not very friendly. After figuring out how to scroll through the menu icons at the top, I finally found the network setup menu. I chose the wireless connection setup and went through the screens. I was not only disappointed with the lack of interface here I was appalled at it. Remember, I have a 32-character network password with tons of special characters so I was instantly beat-down when I saw how I had to enter it into the Epson. There’s no on-screen keyboard at all. What is has is a single character space for you to hit up and down arrows to scroll through the alphabet one letter at a time. And when you need to type a special character you have to switch to the character menu and again, scroll through all the special characters until you get to the one you want. So while I got the HP online in 5 minutes, here I was around 20 minutes into the Epson configuration and I still wasn’t on the network. And at one point I mistyped one of the characters in my password and needed to erase it and it took me quite a while of playing with the console to figure out how to delete it. So now that I was back on track I finally got my password entered and the printer refused to get on the network. So I tried to check my network password in the config, but it was hidden from me. And not only that, there was no way to change individual settings in the wireless network setup itself. I have to enter everything in from scratch. OK, so here comes my password again. And when I got done, I still had no network connection.
I then decided to look at the manual. The manual told me to hardwire it to the network first and then setup the wireless networking. I don’t understand the logic behind that, but ok. So I carried the printer into my lab and plugged it into my router. I went back to the networking setup on the console and set it up for DHCP on my network. But it refused to grab an IP address. So I rebooted the printer, but still no luck. Then I tried to enter in an IP manually on the printer console. Here’s where the interface really bit me again. Where I was supposed to enter the IP, there was no way to enter a period. So any of the octets that didn’t have three numbers couldn’t be typed because it would turn 172.16.1.51 into 172.160.100.510. You can see how that’s just not the same thing. I spent plenty of time with the console trying to figure out how to type the period to keep the zero from being put in that last place. I gave up for the day. The next day I had a friend who was certified in printer repair come over. After looking at it for just a minute he told me that some printers will do IP addresses like that. He told me that I needed to get the IP I wanted I needed to type 172.016.001.051. I’ve been in IT for 15 years and while I don’t specialize in network printers I do have several certifications including networking. And this method isn’t even close to intuitive. So once we got the IP entered the printer went on the network and then I was able to install the software on my desktop and setup the wireless networking. And now that I was on my keyboard entering the password was really easy. So mission accomplished after a full 24hrs of tinkering. The printer was now on the network.
OK, I wrote that much on the setup for a reason. I wanted you to understand just how insufficient the interface on the console of this printer is. Epson clearly wants its users using the software from their desktop and they’re not concerned with providing a good experience for those who find themselves standing at the printer itself. I’ll tell you what though. Let’s agree that I don’t like the console interface or much of the software that comes with this printer and just move on to the rest of the review because there’s plenty to love about this printer and I want to get to that stuff too.
I started with the same tests as with the HP. I began with a simple print test over the network and that went well so I moved on. I jumped immediately into high-quality photo printing and I wasn’t disappointed in the least. I’ve had several Epsons in the past and they’ve always been above their competition in print quality, especially for photos. And while the HP printed incredible photos, this printer easily matches the HP’s quality. Or is it that the HP finally matches the Epson’s quality? Anyway… I was also very pleased with the speed the Epson printed photos. The Epson prints photos in just a few seconds. I also printed a couple full page photos which also printed very quickly and beautifully.
I moved on to scanning next with some interesting results. I started in office mode where I loaded 10 pages into the document feeder. The pages were scanned one after another very quickly and lined up on my computer screen. For this first pass at least, none of them were twisted, skewed, or otherwise imperfect in any way. Then I moved directly into scanning documents of different sizes. I loaded full-size pages, half pages, ¾ pages and they all fed and scanned just fine. I’ve always been impressed with devices that can handle different sized pages that easily. So the Epson easily passes the scan test.
Next I did some mass printing. I created some flyers and printed a few dozen copies of each one. I did this on both the HP and the Epson. And I’m able to report that the Epson was actually quicker. The difference in speed is all in how you present the data. I’d say in my tests the Epson was probably about 10 pages ahead of the HP. And that really sounds impressive until you present it in time and realize that the difference is around 30 seconds or so. However, it’s still faster, and were I printing flyers for several hours at a time, I’d probably rather have the Epson because it would eventually get further ahead of the HP.
The Bottom Line: The Epson is a solid, lightning-fast printer that produces consistently excellent documents and photos whether you’re printing or scanning. The document feeder fulfills my need for scanning multiple documents and can handle multiple sizes at once. And one thing I forgot to mention above is that the Epson also uses an individual ink system. It uses 4 inks instead of 5, but that doesn’t seem to hinder it in the least. I had some initial trouble getting it on the network, but once I did it’s been solid. I’ve made no secret that I don’t like much about the console interface or the surrounding software that comes with this printer, but once you get down to printing, the Epson Workforce 600 is easily one of the best printers on the market. So Epson, this is directly from me to you. If you put some real work into usability you could clean up. And frankly, I can’t wait to see what you do in the future.