Epson WorkForce 320 Color Inkjet All-in-One (C11CB79201) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Epson has been known for years to use drop on demand ink technology giving us pixelless printing, but here for the sub-100 usd price you get much more than a color printer. They did strip some of the more corporate printer frills like network interfaces and wireless, but those appear in their more expensive models. This is definitely the entry line (320) with the 323 and 326 series printers offering more features.
0 - ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! While every manufacturer I have bought or reviewed so far has "high capacity" and "low capacity" ink (for more profit) - this is the FIRST product I have found that shipped with the high capacity cartridges (the 125 series) The 124 series are the low capacity. Epson knocks this one out of the park for filling the tanks full from the factory instead of giving you enough ink for 100 pages before you must go to the store. It's getting heavy use and the ink has not even started to go down yet. It's good for the environment since the ink tanks are the same size - you just don't throw out the ones that came with the printer after 100 sheets have printed and head to the profit center, i mean, supply store to buy fullsize ink cartridges.
1 - you get a fax. And not just a fax, a high resolution fax - very high, and not just black and white - COLOR too!
2 - you get a coppier - we're pretty much accustomed to that feature by now in small printers
3 - you get a color scanner with sheetfeed ability - nice at times! And on top of all that it even comes with an OCR package to convert your paper to a paperless society
4 - you get 4 tanks of ink - not just one - this way when one runs dry it's a $10 replacement. However, you do have $40 worth of ink in the printer. Kodak uses a single 4 chamber ink, much worse of a design since when one color is empty you toss the remaining ink out.
5 - while not quite as fast at zipping out the paper as my kodak printer I reviewed for vine (and it was close to 300 bucks) it does a respectable 4 pages black/ 2 color per minute of laser
quality printing (kodak's fastest mode unfortunately produced banding from going different directions with the printhead) UPDATE: After alot of usage i'm finding the epson printer is faster than specified and very happy with it.
6 - ink price is relatively comparable - for a full kodak refill you are looking at a MSRP of 27 bucks - for epson the MSRP is 40 bucks, and I suspect discounts are on the epson, but not kodak.
7 - finally - smudge proof color ink! Ever run a highlighter over an inkjet printout only to smear the highlighted text into a wipe? It wont happen here (and to be fair neither on the kodak)
So the biggest win here is the pricepoint of the printer. Kodak's claim to fame is that their 13 dollar cheaper ink refills will save in the long time, which may be true if you buy paper by the 10 ream box, but I don't print that much - It took 6 months to use up kodak's trial cartriges they shipped with the printer. To break the two hundred dollar difference you would need to use ALOT of kodak ink. Plus the kodak does not have a fax, much less a color fax, for under a benjamin. Additionally, kodak encodes the proper inking recipe on the back of their photo paper, so you must use kodak paper to make things work right or your prints will be a tad off. Cheap ink, but expensive proprietary paper on the kodak system.
I think Epson has integrated the all in one here very well. If you print photos, business documents & text, etc then you should be very pleased with this unit. I will say it is a tad slower than Kodak at getting big (30-50 page) documents printed, but I normally print screenshots. Although I was impressed with what vine sent in the kodak offering, I am considering removing a star from it because this offers so much more. There are some considerations however - Kodak integrated a small viewscreen, and kodak integrated wifi printing, both of which are omitted at the entry level 320 epson, so perhaps the kodak printer does give you a bit extra. The 5x price HP business inkjet 2600 uses 4 ea inks (and the black is big for text) - makes good color, has 2 paper trays integrated into the win7 driver so you can do 8.5x11 and 11x17 paper without walking to the printer to change it, and it has a built in duplexer versus the manual duplex that both epson and kodak do - you print 1/2 of the pages, put them back in the right way after you learn, then print the other side. HP did a good job on the business inkjet system, however the ink was a bit pricy. Their claim to fame was that when a nozzle on a printhead failed, the printer knew it and averaged it out so no banding. again, you can buy 5 of these for 1 of the HP units.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Epson WorkForce 320 Color Inkjet All-in-One (C11CB79201)

Epson WorkForce 320 Color Ink Jet All-in-One Print/Copy/Scan/Fax

Get 25% OFF

Click here for more information about Epson WorkForce 320 Color Inkjet All-in-One (C11CB79201)