IT Pro Verdict
With its huge duty cycle, the WF-8010DW has the staying power to keep up with print hungry workgroups. Real world print speeds are well down on those quoted, but for a sub-£300 A3 printer, colour quality is very good - and it’s cheap to run as well.
Pros
- +
Affordable; Good print quality; Versatile connection options
Cons
- -
Print speeds fall below stated claims; Setup and deployment is a hassle
Epson's WorkForce Pro WF-8010DW is ready for hard hitting workgroups as this A3+ inkjet has an enormous 65,000 page maximum monthly duty cycle. It teams this up with impressively low running costs and also claims a speedy 34ppm top speed for both A4 mono and colour prints.
It's aimed at businesses that want plenty of paper choices to hand, as the single 250-sheet A3+ base cassette can be augmented with three more 500-sheet trays. The large rear MPT has room for 80-sheets up to A3+ sizes and it can handle 256gms heavyweight paper as well.
The WF-8010DW uses the same PrecisionCore print head technology as Epson's commercial printers while its high-capacity DuraBrite Pro ink tanks deliver laser-matching print costs. Go for the high-yield XL cartridges and you'll pay a penny for a mono A4 page and 4.3p for a colour one.
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Deployment got off to a poor start as the setup disk wasn't included, so we had to download all the drivers and software from Epson's support site. The Windows drivers and software update tool loaded without any problems but Epson's Easy Photo Print utility failed to work until we had located and installed the separate Easy Print module.
Our first test print also showed the black ink nozzles were partially blocked so we had to run a wasteful cleaning cycle and nozzle pattern test to remedy this. With its nose wiped clean, the printer then proceeded to produce an impressive print quality.
The driver's Standard mode delivered the sharpest text, as we found the High setting left a slight dusting around smaller fonts. The latter produced superior mono photos though, with good levels of detail and lacking the banding evident in Standard mode prints.
Stay on the High road for colour, as you'll be greeted with bold, punchy reports and sharp, glossy photos with no banding or edge bleeding. The rich colour quality from the DuraBrite Pro ink really made our test A3 posters look good and we found them vibrant and eye-catching.
You won't have to wait long either; A3 posters on 100gms paper at the High setting took 16 seconds to produce. Even on premium glossy photo paper, the printer delivered an A3 colour poster in 129 seconds and an A4 photo in 75 seconds.
Alas, for general office printing, we couldn't get close to Epson's claimed speeds as even on the driver's Economy setting, our 34-page Word document returned a noisy 22ppm. Best mode dropped this to 12.5ppm whilst duplexing the document in Standard mode returned a cacophonous 16ppm.
The printer is well connected, although you can't have wired and wireless connection active together. We printed directly from our iPad over AirPrint and WiFi Direct and used Epson's iPrint iOS app to print files straight from our Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote and OneDrive accounts.
The Epson Connect cloud service allows remote users to email print jobs as attachments to the printer. After registering, we received a unique email address for the printer and used our account portal to create approved sender lists and decide which features they could access.
Businesses with a fleet of Epson printers will find the Device Admin tool useful as it allows them all to be managed from one interface. Along with scheduled usage reports, it can also apply device templates to maintain settings consistency.
With its huge duty cycle, the WF-8010DW has the staying power to keep up with print hungry workgroups. Real world print speeds are well down on those quoted, but for a sub-300 A3 printer, colour quality is very good - and it's cheap to run as well.
This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 274
Verdict
With its huge duty cycle, the WF-8010DW has the staying power to keep up with print hungry workgroups. Real world print speeds are well down on those quoted, but for a sub-£300 A3 printer, colour quality is very good - and it’s cheap to run as well.
4800 x 1200dpi A3+ colour inkjet printer
512MB RAM
34ppm A4 mono/colour
Gigabit
11n wireless
WiFi Direct
AirPrint
USB 2
Duplex
250-sheet A3+ paper tray
80-sheet A3+ rear MPT, max monthly duty cycle, 65,000 pages
567 x 570 x 378 mm WDH
26kgs
1yr on-site warranty
