Epson WorkForce WF-110W review: Portable perfection

Epson’s WorForce WF-110W is a portable colour inkjet printer. It’s a diminutive thing – we’ve eaten bigger boxes of chocolates – aimed strictly at people who need to print on the go. As such, you shouldn’t expect the same breadth of features as you’d get from a full-sized MFP: there’s no scanner, no automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, and even no paper output tray.

Instead, the WF-110W is focused on quick and easy printing away from the facilities of a typical office. For a start, there’s a built-in battery, good for a claimed 50 colour or 100 black pages. You can directly power and recharge the printer from its supplied AC adaptor, or leave that at home and just use a USB connection to recharge from a PC, in a car, or on buses or trains with powered USB ports.

The WF-110W also supports wireless networking, so you can set it up either with an access point such as a router, or in an ad-hoc partnership with your laptop. Epson has covered everything: even if you find yourself having to borrow a strange PC, and with no internet access, you can install a basic Windows print driver via a USB connection to the printer itself.

Considering this focus on portability, it’s a shame that the WF-110W doesn’t come with a case, but it does feel reasonably solid. The body plastics seem tough, and the paper input tray folds over to protect the colour screen and keep dust out of the paper slot. While the tray is rated at only 20 pages, we had to fill it beyond that to complete our 25 and 24-page tests. We found that it coped with a small amount of overloading, although we experienced misfeeds when we got to around 30 sheets of 80gsm paper.

For performance, don’t expect too much from the WF-110W and you won’t be disappointed. Epson says it will print black text at a modest seven pages per minute (ppm), and we measured 6.9ppm – rising to 9.6ppm at draft quality. While Epson says it’ll hit 4ppm on colour prints, we measured only 2.2ppm on our complex graphical test: on a par with some cheaper home office inkjets. On battery power the print speed almost halves to conserve charge: we measured just 3.9ppm on black text.

Happily, there’s little compromise on print quality. Black text was firm and dark, while graphics were also strong, exhibiting just some subtle banding on a couple of presentation slides. That said, the WF-110W isn’t a great photo printer. Six 6x4in postcards took more than half an hour, and the results lacked the high-gloss finish you’d get from a photo-focused printer – though they were otherwise acceptable for very occasional use.

Unfortunately, running costs are higher than usual, particularly when it comes to black ink. While the supplied 250-page black and 200-page colour cartridges still had plenty of ink remaining after our standard tests – not something we can always say – their replacements work out at 12.5p per page. Of this, the black component is a huge 6p per page; 2-3p is more typical for an inkjet.

The WorkForce WF-110W is not without compromise, then, but it’s almost ideally suited to the role it’s built for. Don’t expect to use it for high-volume printing back in the office and you’re likely to love it. We’d certainly recommend it as a genuinely portable printer for those who need one.

Epson WorkForce WF-110W specifications