Epson WorkForce 630 Color Inkjet All-in-One (C11CB07201) Review

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(More customer reviews)Physical Features
Right out of the box, there are a few nice features to this printer - as well as a couple of not so nice ones. First, the document feeder on top cleverly disappears when you flip it closed to make a continuous and easily dusted surface, plus it looks sleek. Second, the angle of the control panel is easily adjustable with a quick pull of the concealed release handle. Third, there are convenient indentations on the bottom sides of the printer for picking it up and carrying it (a small but thoughtful finger saving feature). Finally, it ships with 4 full ink cartridges. I've purchased printers in the past that provided enough ink to test the printer, but that was about it. Having to shelling out another fifty bucks or more for ink when you first buy a printer is a bit unsavory to me. The lack of a door/cover for the memory card bay and the fact that paper tray has a dust collecting cutout in front are the only two areas lacking in the physical design of this printer.
Setup
From unpacking to printing a test page over my wireless network took about 40 minutes. The process included installing and priming the ink (which takes a few minutes), installing the drivers, connecting via USB (to make setting up the wireless connection faster - but you can use the printer keyboard if you have prefer), and then connecting wirelessly. Connecting wirelessly was so easy, at first I worried how secure my network was. All I needed to do was confirm my SSID. Since I was installing from a laptop using the same network, the software took care of getting all the needed information from the PC. I didn't even have to enter a WEP key.
Bonus Software
Installing the bonus software for photo editing and scanning, as well as updating the drivers, took about another 30 minutes. Registration was quick because the software filled in many of the blanks like name, email, state, zip, and serial number of the printer (not sure how I feel about where/how it got my personal information since I have no other Epson products).
Of note, the first attempt at the driver updates via the wireless connection failed. I had to plug in the USB cable again and then update. Then, when I got up the next morning, the scanner was not found by the computer so I used the driver update utility again and, for the second time, it found updated drivers for the printer and the scanner. It also popped up a window this time warning to install the printer driver first. After installing the printer driver, rebooting, and then installing the scanner driver, all was well. Of note, the second driver installation went well over the wireless connection. My guess is that the failed first attempt caused the scanner driver to be installed first.
Overall
This is a fast printer and scanner. The scanner warm up is very brief. This brief warm up allows the printer to turn off the bulb soon after the scan competes, thus saving power. Scanning documents using the ADF worked flawlessly. Scanning into color PDF files took a couple of minutes per page, including the file conversion. Printing pages of Word documents was lightening fast in both color and black and white. Making a color copy on the standard quality setting using the ADF took about 26 seconds including the scanner warm up. Photo printing speed was good and the quality, for a multifunction unit, was good as well.
The scanner software is basic and lacks some of the features of my Canon MP830 such as the ability to scan several pictures at a time into multiple .jpg files (in essence one pass of the scanner creates several pictures). The picture printing software is very easy to use and also very basic. There is not much editing capability besides positioning, color correction and adding a frame.
The price of the ink seems a bit high for the black, nearly twice the price of my Canon MP830. Epson's claim is that it lasts up to twice as long, so time will tell if it is worth the price. The CMY color pack is about the same price.
There is one issue that is almost worthy of losing a star. Twice, when I launched the "Epson Scan Settings" program it was unable to communicate with the scanner. I had to hit the refresh button to get it to appear. Also, when I tried to launch "Epson Scan" it would not launch until I hit refresh in the "Epson Scan Settings" program (they are two separate programs). That is too quirky for my tastes and now I am faced with wasting time searching for solutions - or putting up with it until a future update fixes it.
The price of this Epson is less than half of what I paid for my Canon, but it lacks duplex printing with the automatic document feeder. In exchange you get really fast printing wirelessly. Overall, this is a quality printer at a really reasonable price.


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Epson WorkForce 630 Color Ink Jet All-in-One |Print|Copy|Scan|Fax|Wi-Fi

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