By May 24, 2011

Epson Stylus Office BX625FWD review

bx625fwd This week we’re continuing our look at all-in-one printers available at the moment with the Epson Stylus Office BX625FWD, a 4-in-1 office printer.

This model features duplex printing, faxing, copying and has built in WiFi and 6.3cm colour screen on the control panel.

The machine is by no means small but with so many features crammed in to one package does it do everything well or are there compromises being made?

 

The 10 second review:

  • Product: Epson Stylus Office BX625FWD inkjet printer
  • Price: around £120
  • Summary: A great 4-in-1 office printer with low running and capital cost
  • Best of: true all-in-one office machine, fast
  • Worst of: large footprint, not good for photos
  • Buy now from: Amazon

 

What’s in the box?

  • Printer
  • Start here guide, basic operations guide, Wifi set guide plus 2 CDs
  • 4 ink cartridges
  • Printer
  • Power cable
  • Phone cable

 

Epson Stylus Office BX625FWD specification:

  • Printing Method: 4-colour inkjet printer, Epson Micro Piezo print head
  • Nozzle Configuration: 384 nozzles black / 128 nozzles, each colour (cyan, magenta, yellow)
  • Droplet Size: 2 pl (minimum) with Variable-sized Droplet Technology
  • Ink System: Epson DURABrite Ultra Ink
  • Print Resolution: Up to 5760×1440 optimised dpi on suitable media using RPM (Resolution Performance Management)
  • Print Speed Black Text A4: Up to 38 ppm. Laser-like quality Black text A4: Up to 15 ppm (ISO/IEC 24734)
  • Print Speed Colour Text A4: Up to 38 ppm, Laser-like quality Colour text A4: Up to 7.1 ppm (ISO/IEC 24734)
  • Print Speed Photo 10×15: Approx. 20 secs
  • Printer Interface: Hi-Speed USB – Compatible with USB 2.0 specification, Wireless LAN IEEE 802.11b/g/n, Wired LAN IEEE 802.3 (100BASE-TX, 10BASE-T), USB Flash Drive, Wireless Security: WEP – 64 bit, WEP – 128 bit, WPA – PSK (TKIP) – compliant with WPA2, WPA – PSK (AES) – compliant with WPA2
  • Scan Speed Black A4: 300 dpi 1.1 msec/line, 600 dpi 1.9 msec/line
  • Scan Speed Colour A4: 300 dpi 3.0 msec/line, 600 dpi 5.8. msec/line
  • Scanning Technology: A4 Flatbed colour image scanner
  • Sensor Type: CIS
  • Scan Resolution: 2400×2400 dpi
  • Fax Speed: Up to 33.6 kbps
  • Fax Speed Dials Max: 60 names and numbers, Other features: Group dial, Delayed fax, Broadcast fax (mono only)
  • Fax Resolution: Standard (200×100), Fine (200×200), Photo (200×200 with error diffusion)
  • Fax Error Correction Mode: CCITU/ITU Group3 fax with Error Correction Mode
  • Fax Page Memory: Up to 180 pages (ITU-T No.1 chart)
  • Fax Transmission Speed: Approx. 3 sec per page
  • Power Consumption: Approx. 16W (Stand-alone copying, ISO/IEC 24712 pattern), Approx. 3.8W (sleep mode), ENERGY STAR® qualified printer
  • Voltage: AC 220-240V
  • Optional Warranty: 3 years if available
  • Standard Warranty: 1 year standard warranty
  • Dimensions W x D x H: 446x360x221 mm
  • Operating Systems: Windows XP/XP-x64/Vista, Win 7, Mac OS 10.4.11 or later
  • Weight: 7.6 kg (excluding ink cartridges and power cable)

 

General

The front of the BX625FWD has a large control panel complete with a sizable colour LCD screen in the middle. All aspects of the printer setup and operation can be controlled via this panel with the menu structure and options appearing on the display and navigation via a d-pad style control along with numeric pad for entry.

BX625FWD_02

 

Also on the front left-side, towards the bottom, is a card reader with support for SD, XD, MS-pro and compact flash. There’s also a USB socket for pluggin in USB memory stick. These not only allow you to print pictures and documents from the memory cards but also save scanned documents back to the memory cards.

BX625FWD_02

 

The top of the printer has an large ADF unit that will take up to 30 pages at a time. Lift this up and there’s a full flatbed for scanning documents that wont fir through the ADF.

bx625fwd-top-up

 

On the back you’ll find two RJ11 sockets. One to plug in to the phone line and the other to plug a phone in to as a pass-through. Below that is the mains socket which accepts a standard figure-8/C7 plug (no external power pack).

Inset on the left side of the printer are sockets for USB and Ethernet.

bx625fwd-back

 

Review

Got this printer out of the box to start set up and like all printer it came with the little piece of tape to keep everything closed during transit well I am sure this had more of those little bits of tape than any other printer! As this printer has an LED screen the first part of set up once I had turned the printer on was to set the language, date and time.

The ink cartridges for this printer come vacuum sealed but are very easy to open and the just have a little pull tab over the nozzle. They clicked in to place really nicely. What I noticed while installing the inks is that there is a little guide inside the printer with the replacement part numbers for the inks. As like most printers these days you have the choice of standard or XL inks.

Initialisation of the ink took around 5 minutes. It also warns to in the set up guide that as the inks are used to charge the print head you may get less pages from these cartridges compared to subsequent ones. I thought that was good thing to be mentioned.

Next was to install the software and get the printer connected over Wi-Fi. The software took around 15 minutes to install although some of that could be down to my laptop as it is well past its prime! After the software install the setup of the Wi-Fi is completed on the printer then the computer makes the connection via the software.

Overall the printer was up and running, from box to first page out in well under 30 minutes. Whist it may not be a race does indicate how easy it is.

This printer also has a built in fax which seems to be far less common for an all-in-one printer to have these days. I didn’t test this feature as I do not know anyone else with a fax but for a small business this would so handy. You are asked during the set up if you wish to set up this feature. One of the other great things about this is that colour fixing is supported as is faxing direct from the PC without the need to first print.

 

Scanning functionality is excellent and copies are reproduced really good detail. Scanning speed is fast and thanks to the ADF you can start scanning and walk away to do something else. The only thing with the ADF is that it’s a bit fussy about the paper you put in it, thin pages such as non-carbon copy invoices of paper that’s not totally flat or pristine can cause it to either jam or not to pick up the paper.

Another good feature here is that you can scan to PDF or JPG and have the copy sent to your PC or, a feature we think is great, save the scan to USB or memory card.

 

Epson quote a 15ppm for mono or just a little over 7ppm for colour and a staggering 38ppm for both colour or mono in draft mode. However, just with every other printer we’ve looked at in the past we were unable to reproduce these quoted speeds (we’d love to know how the manufacturers test!) but that said the BX625 is still quite nippy. Mono documents came out in an average of 11 pages per minute where colour pages, text with some pie charts, came out at around 5ppm. There is a bit of a pause between pressing print and the job actually starting so larger print jobs return a better average than smaller ones.

 

As with other Epson printers reviewed recently, the BX625FWD offers excellent print-quality. Looking at sample print outs in both plain-text and from Word it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between this and the output from our laser printer.

The colour output is also good, graphics in the form of Excel charts are bright and punchy while colour photos are acceptable. You wont be wanting to print your holiday snaps from this printer and it certainly wont replace even the cheapest of dedicated photo printers but, again, I would say they are acceptable for business use. They have plenty of detail but the colours have a tendency to end up a bit ‘muddy’ in photos although this does improve with higher quality coated paper. There is a definite trade-off between speed and quality here.

 

 

Conclusion

I really liked this printer. For me anyone who runs a business at home this would be ideal as it has all the functions you need and at the same time it is nice and compact. It is well priced to make it good value considering the features it has. Whilst I know fax is a dying method of communication in business sometimes it is still needed and to have built in to something you use all the time makes it so much more convenient.

We found the Epson BX625FWD for just under £117 on Amazon, and to me this is a bit of a bargain. I just wish that wireless printing was supported from the iPad on Epson rather than just HP printers!

 

Review by: Tracy

Posted in: Printers, Reviews

About the Author:

More than 20 years in the IT industry. Blogging with a passion and thirst for new technology since 2005.
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