Epson WorkForce WF-7510

Printers like the Epson WorkForce WF-7510 ($249.99 direct), are naturally niche products, of interest only to offices that need to print, scan, fax, or copy on paper that's larger than letter and legal size. The WF-7510 fits in an even tighter niche than most. With only one paper tray, the printer is most suitable for a small, micro, or home office that either doesn't need to change paper sizes often or already has a printer for letter and legal size, and needs a larger size printer to supplement it. The good news is that it fits that niche very well.

The WF-7510 has a lot in common with the Epson WorkForce WF-7520 ($299.99 direct, 4 stars) that I recently reviewed. In fact, except for the second paper tray in the WF-7520, the two printers share many of the same of features.

Like the WF-7520, the WF-7510 can print and fax from, as well as scan to, a PC, including over a network, and work as a standalone fax machine and copier. For scanning, both the flatbed and the 30-page automatic document feeder (ADF) can handle up to tabloid size paper.

Paper handling is obviously limited by the single tray. However note that unlike the directly competitive Brother MFC-J6510DW ($250, 4 stars), the WF-7510 isn't limited to a maximum 11 by 17 inches for paper size. The tray is designed for paper up to 13 by 19 inches, and can even accept larger sizes, up to 13 by 44 inches, one sheet at time, although anything over 19 inches long will be hanging out from the front of the tray.

Setup and Speed
Setting up the printer is standard fare, with network support for both Ethernet and Wi-Fi. For my tests I connected using the Ethernet port and installed the driver and software on a Windows Vista system.

Not surprisingly, the WF-7510 tied the WF-7520 for speed. I timed both on our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software) at the same 3.9 pages per minute (ppm). That makes both closely matched to the Brother MFC-J6510DW as well as the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J6710DW ($300 street, 4 stars), which both came in at 4.1 ppm. The WF-7510 was much faster for photos than any of these other printers, averaging 1 minute 13 seconds for a 4 by 6, but it's also the only one in the group that I tested with a matte paper rather than a glossy photo paper.

Output Quality and Other Issues
Output quality for the WF-7510 is best described as not particularly impressive, but good enough so it's a not a problem. Text quality is par for an inkjet, which makes it more than good enough for almost any business use, although not something you'd want for serious desktop publishing. Graphics output in my tests was a little below par, but easily good enough for any internal business use. Depending on your level of perfectionism, you may or may not consider the output with default settings to be suitable for PowerPoint handouts or the like.

Photos are a special case, because Epson recommended using a matte presentation paper for our tests instead of the more typical glossy photo paper. Epson lists the paper on its Web site as a photo paper, however, and says that it's typical of the paper most businesses use for printing photos on the WF-7510. In any case, all of the photo output was suitable for business presentations or the like, and most of the photos qualified as true photo quality.

One other issue that demands mention is the running cost for the WF-7510. Epson resists quoting a cost per page, but based on the cost of the cartridges and the claimed yield, the cost per page for letter size pages comes out to 3.2 cents per monochrome page and 11.5 cents per color page. As a point of reference, the Brother MFC-6510DW works out to 1.7 cents per mono page and 7.0 cents per color page. How much this difference in cost per page matters will depend primarily on how many pages you expect to print.

Both the Epson WorkForce WF-7510 and the Brother MFC-6510DW offer only one tray, which is part of what makes them directly competitive (although the Brother printer also offers a manual feed.) It's hard to give an enthusiastic recommendation to either one, given that the Epson WF-7520 and Brother MFC-6710DW both add a second tray without costing much more. But if you don't need to switch paper sizes very often, are looking for a second printer strictly for large-size printing, or just need the tabloid-size scan capability, either will do. And if you need to print on paper that's larger than 11 by 17 inches, the Epson WorkForce WF-7510 is the obvious choice.

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