Printer Review: Epson B-510DN

Cheap inkjet printers give inkjet printers a bad name. It's hard to think of the category without thinking of the disposable inkjets popular with consumers -- $49 printers with $50 sets of ink cartridges, skimpy duty cycles, and sky-high costs per page. As a result, when envisioning a color printer for a medium-sized office or workgroup, most of us envision a color laser printer.

Epson has a different suggestion. The B-510DN is a color inkjet built for business -- for documents, not photos (it has a photo or best-quality setting, but it doesn't do borderless prints), with a monthly duty cycle of 20,000 pages.

It's no shrinking violet, taking some 19 by 22 inches of desk space and weighing 25 pounds, and it's too noisy to share your desk with your phone -- you'll want it on a table or stand of its own, using its Ethernet connection as part of your office network (though solo operators can plug into a USB 2.0 port).

And its costs per page are surprisingly, wonderfully low -- less than four cents per color page when using its highest-capacity ink cartridges. That compares very favorably to the tens and teens of cents per color page of most desktop color laser printers, and should easily help IT managers justify the Epson's price of $599. Add impressive print quality, and you've got a bona fide alternative to a workgroup color laser.

Running the Numbers

According to Epson, the standard-capacity cartridges that come with the printer are good for approximately 3,000 pages for black and 3,500 for cyan, magenta, and yellow. Replacements cost $40 for black and $50 apiece for the three colors. That divides out to 1.3 cents per black and 5.6 cents per color page, which is pretty good.

Once the starter cartridges are used up, however, smart users will replace them with more economical, higher-capacity units -- 8,000 pages for black ($70) and 7,000 for color ($60 each). Even if you factor in the cost of a $17.50 "maintenance box" that collects stray ink during priming and printing and must be replaced every 35,000 pages or so, the B-510DN will then set you back about 0.9 cent per black and 3.5 cents per color page.

Xerox's solid-ink printers can compete with that, but under-$1,000 color lasers can't. If your company has been wishing you could afford color printing for everyday, in-house documents as well as client presentations and marketing materials, the Epson will definitely catch your attention.

If you can't afford the B-510DN, Epson offers a $399 sibling called the B-310N, but that model makes several compromises for its lower cost: Besides lacking the B-510DN's automatic duplexer and settling for a letter- instead of legal-size paper tray, it's rated for only half the duty cycle and takes only the standard-, not the high-capacity cartridges. We're so moved by that 3.5 cents figure that we'd hold out for the upper model.

Touch and Go

Setup is simple: The ink cartridges, each about the size of a drugstore paperback, slide into slots behind a door at the printer's front left; flipping a lever locks them into place. The maintenance box fits behind another door at bottom right.

The main input tray or drawer holds a whole ream (500 sheets) of paper, a welcome difference from those puny consumer inkjets. Another 150 fit into a vertical tray or sheet feeder (also suitable for up to 15 envelopes or sheets of mailing labels) at the rear. We experienced no paper jams in our testing.

A minimal two-line LCD (with simple status gauges for the ink cartridges) and handful of buttons serve as a control panel for nozzle cleaning and other maintenance tasks, but we interacted with the printer via the software driver, which offers a good variety of single- and double-sided printing, collate, fit-to-page, N-up, poster, and watermark functions. The B-510DN uses its own printer language for Windows (2000 and later) and Mac OS X (10.3.9 and later) systems, with no PCL or PostScript emulation, though you can change its color palette from the default "Epson Vivid" to Adobe RGB.

Speaking of everyday, in-house documents, the Epson has one inkjet feature that lasers lack: a draft or high-speed printing mode, which outruns most desktop lasers we've tested -- six seconds for a one-page business letter with spot-color logo, 1 minute and 5 seconds for a 20-page Microsoft Word document. It's not too drafty for proofreading or other real-world uses, either -- images look like newspaper photos but text, though a little thin, is black, not gray, and perfectly readable.

The next highest quality modes are labeled Text and Text & Image, for documents without and with pictures, respectively. Both are hardly slower than Draft printing: Text & Image mode took just seven seconds for the business letter, Text mode took 1 minute and 13 seconds for the 20-page Word file (though opting for duplex printing slowed that to three and a half minutes).

We did most of our printing in Text & Image mode, which offers a nice combination of speed -- 36 seconds for six full-page PowerPoint slides, 3 minutes and 23 seconds for a 55-page Adobe Acrobat document -- and quality, with sharp, dark text and vivid colors.

We were pleased that our Text & Image printouts showed very little banding -- the telltale horizontal lines that indicate an inkjet's multiple passes back and forth across a page, most visible in solid-color areas such as pie or bar charts. Faint, thin lines did pop up, but only occasionally (bisecting a couple of boxes in a PowerPoint org chart, for instance, but impressively absent from the dark background of the slide).

Switching to the slower Graphic mode (just under one and six minutes for the six PowerPoints and 55-page PDF, respectively) killed the banding in all save one of our half-dozen test files, and if we hadn't been specifically looking for it we might have overlooked it there. The slowest of all, Photo mode, produced perfect, banding-free prints, but took too long to be practical (three and one-third minutes for the six PowerPoint slides).

Still, whenever we were tempted to grumble about the Epson's everyday print quality being merely very good instead of perfect, we remembered that remarkable 3.5 cents figure. The B-510DN might not replace a color laser printer for your most critical client documents, but it's an outstanding replacement for the monochrome laser printer your workgroup's probably sharing now. It brings color into the office while bringing a smile to the CFO.