On a damp and dreary morning some two and a half decades ago (yes, decades), I left the make-believe comfort of my cramped New York City apartment and drove down to Cherry Hill, NJ. I was the service manager for a ComputerLand at the time and I needed a certificate to become an authorized Epson repair tech for the wildly popular MX-80. Cherry Hill was where you had to go to get it.

In case you don’t remember the MX-80, it was an evolutionary, small, lightweight, inexpensive dot matrix printer. As if all of those adjectives weren’t enough, it wasn’t very complex –which meant it could be repaired rather than just tossed in a landfill should it break down. (It was an important consideration because we hadn’t yet become a credit card nation.)

Despite the printer’s simplicity, Epson, I discovered, had some very specific diagnostic procedures it demanded we use. The process wasn’t new but it was a rude introduction to the concept of the diagnostic tree for those of us who typically repaired parts by the seat of our pants. At the time, we all mostly hated Epson’s attention to detail (my instructor sent me back to the bench twice because I’d solved problems by hop-scotching over the intermediate steps).

Now, some twenty-five years later, a look back in time points out how that detail orientation has led to a line-up of excruciatingly well-made printers. If you’re a TechNudge reader, you know I have an Epson CX9400Fax. I love it and replaced an aging HP K80 All-in-One with it. So when Epson gave me the opportunity to play with examine its WorkForce 600 I naturally jumped at the opportunity.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, lets look down the list of features as Epson presents them:

• 5 in 1 with WiFi: Print / Copy / Scan / Photo / Fax
• Draft speeds up to 38 ppm (black and color)
• Laser quality documents about 2x faster
• WiFi and Ethernet networking built in
• Extra High-capacity Black ink
• 2-year limited warranty with registration
• Smudge, fade, water resistant, highlighter friendly
• Uses up to 3x less power than a laser printer
• Fax and 30-page ADF
• Built-in memory card slots and 2.5-inch LCD

In case you’re not impressed with what Epson claims it can do, let me be among the first to tell you that the WorkForce 600 will fit into your All-in-One cradle and do so for under $200 at current Internet pricing.

Installation
Now that you’ve decided to buy it, you’ll find that the WorkForce 600 installs like a dream. You have two basic choices for connectivity once you yank it out of the box and put down on its table: LAN or USB. Just pop in the installation disc and follow along. If you’re going the LAN route, Epson will ask if you’re wired or wireless and it applies the settings appropriate to your response. (There’s that “tree” approach again.)

I generally don’t like WiFi/networking alternatives. The speed doing multiple individual pages (rather than multiple copies of a single page) is often too slow. The WorkForce 600 supports 802.11b/g wireless and has 10/100-wired connectivity. Both of those are slower than the possible 480Mbs speed of USB 2.0 (not that that’s much to write home about either). However, I have six computers in the same room that need printing facilities so I wired the WorkForce 600 into a switch to which those computers are attached.

(If you’re using the WorkForce 600 by attaching it to the USB port on your router or Network Attached Storage (NAS) box, Epson recommends that you follow the USB installation instructions rather than using the network installation procedure. It may seem counter-intuitive at first blush but it actually makes total sense. Your router or NAS is handling the network connectivity, not the WorkForce 600.)

All told, it took about 5 minutes to install the printer drivers, scan application, and anything else needed to use the printer on one computer.

The Gory Details
I hate waiting for the end of a review to get to the bad stuff so let me get that out of the way up front. The WorkForce 600 has two flaws: It uses a vertical paper feed arrangement and it has a paper sensor in the feed path.

What’s wrong with vertical? The answer is the same thing that’s been wrong with it for decades. In an uncontrolled environment, under varying conditions of humidity, the paper will invariably curl as it absorbs moisture. If you’re in an environmentally controlled office or tend to actually use the printer so that the paper doesn’t sit in the tray for days or weeks at a time, it’s not going to matter. (And, I could argue, if you are only printing a few pages a week, you don’t need the WorkForce 600. Get a less expensive Epson model; there are plenty.)

As for the sensor, that can be really annoying. I sometimes print Stomper CD/DVD labels. They’re die-cut and have slots through the sheet on both sides of the page so you can grab the label and remove it from the sheet. When that slot and the paper sensor meet, the printer stops printing, thinking it’s reached the end of the page, and spits out the partially printed work. Oh, but you don’t print Stomper labels so why should you care? Well, what about three-hole paper?

There’s a work-around, at least for the three-hole conundrum (because the holes are only on one side of the sheet). You turn the paper around in the tray and then, using the printer’s setup menu, tell it to print with a 180-degree orientation. (Basically, upside down.) That re-orients the printing to match the revised paper position. Voila, everything is fixed and fine.

Speed
This is an excellent printer for reasons that most of us will probably take for granted. Text printing is relatively fast: 30 pages from start to finish, through Microsoft Word, took a mere 1.9 minutes. If you don’t have Excel handy, that’s 15.9 pages per minute.

Epson has a different number in mind – 38 pages per minute. But the company follows that up by noting: “Draft pages/copies per minute (ppm/cpm) speeds measured after first page, based on black and color text patterns in Draft Mode on plain paper. Additional print time will vary based on system configuration, software application and page complexity.”

I’m not going to crucify Epson for that bit of sleight of hand. Every printer manufacturer skews its numbers for the best results for its product. I’m surprised no one’s used “printing without ink,” as a criterion. Besides, draft quality is actually pretty good. I just don’t use it. (That’s a holdover from the MX-80, which was outrageously bad in draft mode.)

The Workforce 600 printed 10 copies of a full-page image (1554×1083) in just 135.1 seconds, or about 4.4 pages per minute. Trim that image back to 778×542 (roughly half a page) and the Workforce 600 churns out 10 pages in 57.1 seconds. That’s 10.5 pages per minute.

Print Quality
Quality is always a sticky point for printers –anybody’s. Black text is no big deal: it’s black text. There’s really no way to mess that up (all right, there are quite a few ways but they’ve mostly disappeared over the last 10 years). Color is another matter.

If you’re printing an image from the Internet or from your camera, the color you see on the screen isn’t necessarily the color of the original object or scene. You need to spend some big bucks to have that happen and the cost is out line for most of us. How does the WorkForce 600 do? I’ll walk in the back way to answer that: It’s faithful to the original you’re printing from your PC. What you see on the screen is what slides out of the paper tray, provided you’ve set up the printer so it knows what type of paper you’re using. It does matter. There are five printing presets and a tweak mode on top of those so you can get very close to what your original is.

A side-note: Epson sent me a stack of glossy photo paper. Whoa! I realize this is the “WorkForce” model but the edge-to-edge picture printing on the glossy stock is outstanding. In fact, I consider them suitable for framing –and that was with the printer out-of-the-box, no adjustments, and default printer settings.

Registration
Registration means more than telling Epson the serial number of your WorkForce 600. It’s the ability of a printer to print in exactly the same place time after time. In terms of today’s inkjets, maybe just twice would be nice.

The WorkForce 600’s registration is perfect and that’s saying a lot for vertical feed printer. Don’t believe me? Check out the image below.

The same image printed twice. The registration is flawless.

It’s actually two images, one printed directly on top of the other by taking the first print out of the exit tray, putting it back in the vertical paper tray, and then printing the second copy over it. Note the lines in the image. There’s not one that looks doubled or even slightly blurred. Trust me, it’s something special.

Scanning
Scanning is a bit more complex because here too there are several modes available. In standard “Home” mode, the image I scanned ended up a bit washed out and pushed slightly toward the green side of life. Honestly, it wasn’t very pretty at all.

The original Batman Tumbler image.

The image was washed out using the "Home" setting.

I switched to “Professional” mode and the result was better, however, it wasn’t great until I went into the advanced section of the scan application that I finally got the images to be most alike.

Standard settings in "Professional" mode.

Professional mode after a few tweaks.

The advanced settings let you tweak things in real time, with the results appearing onscreen before you do the actual final scan. (And as you increase the quality of the scan, it takes longer to complete. That’s one of those quid pro quo things.)

End Bits
The WorkForce 600 has a 30-page automatic document feeder and, of course, it faxes too. I tried the ADF and it worked flawlessly. I didn’t bother with the fax portion. I’m assuming it works the same as the Epson CF9400Fax I have upstairs and that’s been fine out of the box since day one. (Which was many, many, many days ago.)

I also didn’t try the double-sided printing feature. To be honest, that’s what FedEx Kinko’s Office and Print Centers are all about. Most of us don’t need back-to-back documents in any case. Sure, you want to use less paper and save the planet. Well, e-mail if that’s your desire. The novelty of back-to-back quickly wears off. On the other hand, if you’re a SOHO doing a limited number of documents for your afternoon meeting with yourself, the feature is there to be used should you need it.

The 2.5-inch LCD on the front panel is excellent. It has the same great viewability as I’ve already encountered on the CF9400Fax, so Epson couldn’t make me mutter, “Wow.” I think there was a murmured, “Whoa,” when I noticed that entire front control panel pivots forward at a variety of angles or will sit flat and parallel with the front of the WorkForce 600. Likewise, the paper exit tray extends out in use or it can be collapsed back into the printer. Effectively, pushing both of these things out of the way leaves nothing protruding from the front fascia so you can walk by the WorkForce 600 without fear of scarring your hip or shearing something off the printer.

As for Epson’s claim that the WorkForce 600 uses 3 times less power than a laser printer, well, what doesn’t? I have an old Epson Postscript laser printer and it can warm a room. (Although with $100+ print cartridges –when you can find them– I don’t give it much of an opportunity to do so.) That’s because there’s a heating element inside a laser printer that’s used to melt the toner onto the paper. You don’t need one of those for ink. Voila! You get instant power savings!

O’Brien’s Bottom Line
Yesterday, my neighbor asked for an opinion about any AIO printer I might recommend. Naturally, I didn’t let him into Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola (his retinal scan would have been fatal), but I did let him see some of the WorkForce 600’s output. A little later in the day he told me he’d just ordered one with some spare ink and photo paper and got in under $300 for the works.

You don’t do that with a neighbor, especially one who once was the Police Commissioner, unless you’re pretty confident of what he’ll experience. Thankfully, I am. The WorkForce 600 is one of the best AIO printers I’ve used in years and, forgive me for Geeking out, it’s one of the sexiest I’ve seen so far. If I could find a French Maid outfit for it, life would be perfect. I guess I’ll just have to settle for, “darned good.”

For more information about the Epson WorkForce 600, please click here.