Big prints for small offices

Designed for heavy-duty printing in a home or micro office, the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7310 delivers fast speed and impressive paper handling, printing on standard sizes up to 13 by 19 inches.

The $199.99 Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7310 Wireless Wide-Format Printer is aimed at a tight niche: small or home offices that do a lot of color printing on tabloid-size pages (11 by 17 inches) and occasional supertabloid ones (13 by 19 inches) and don't need a built-in scanner. The closest it has to direct competition is the Epson WF-7210, which it replaces in Epson's lineup and also replaces as our Editors' Choice in its very small category. If you don't need a wide-format printer, you can find a much smaller $200 all-in-one printer for regular home use. But if you do, the WF-7310's speed and paper handling are exceptional for its price.

Each of the WF-7310's two 250-sheet drawers can hold up to tabloid-size or A3 paper. A one-sheet manual feed adds the ability to print on standard sizes up to 13 by 19 inches, or on custom sizes as large as 13 by 47.2 inches. With two drawers plus the bypass feed, you can routinely print on multiple kinds of media without a lot of unloading and reloading.

Epson gives the recommended duty cycle at 2,500 pages per month. As a practical matter, if you don't want to refill the paper more than once a week, the 501-sheet capacity translates to about 2,000 pages per month, or an average of 100 per weekday.

Keep in mind that anything larger than tabloid size can be fed only one sheet at a time. Though the WF-7310 offers both duplex printing and borderless printing for up to tabloid size, neither feature is available for anything larger. In short, this is a tabloid printer with bonus supertabloid capacity. If you routinely print on supertabloid pages, a better bet is Epson's WF-7840, though you'll pay more both for the printer and for each printed page.

A little smaller and few pounds lighter than the WF-7210, but still hefty for a home or micro-office printer, the WF-7310 weighs 29.8 pounds and measures 11.7 by 20.3 by 15.7 inches (HWD) with trays closed. It's even more imposing when it's printing: Raise the bypass tray cover on the rear top and fully extend the output tray in front, and it grows to 17.6 by 20.3 by 34.9 inches. That's a lot of desk real estate.

One nice touch is that the output tray automatically extends when you print, so you can leave it closed when you're not printing and not worry about paper spilling out and onto the floor. It also automatically retracts when you turn off the printer.

Installation was straightforward. In addition to loading paper, you only have to install the software from the included disc, or download it and install it; snap in the ink cartridges; and connect your computer to the printer using Ethernet, USB, Wi-Fi, or Wi-Fi direct. The printer also supports both Epson Email Print and Epson Remote print, both of which let you send files to the printer via the internet, and it can print from iOS and Android mobile devices.

For the performance tests, I connected both the printer and our standard printer testbed computer to a network via Ethernet. Results were suitably fast for the WF-7310's ratings of 25ppm for monochrome text and 12ppm for color. I timed our 12-page Word text file at 18ppm (49 seconds) including the first page. On our business applications suite, which combines both monochrome and color output, it came in at 8.6ppm (2 minutes 54 seconds). And for 4-by-6-inch photos, it averaged 43 seconds per photo, using the recommended medium of Epson's Premium Photo Paper Glossy.

These results put the WF-7310 in the middle of a fairly tight range for printers that are broadly in the same class (though most are AIOs). It's a bit faster than the WF-7210, which came in at 15ppm for monochrome text and 7.6ppm for our business applications suite, but a bit slower than three slightly more expensive Epson AIOs. The WorkForce Pro WF-7840, WorkForce Pro WF-7820, and WorkForce EC-C7000 all hit roughly 20ppm (22 to 25 seconds) for monochrome text, and 12ppm (roughly 2 minutes 5 seconds) for our business applications suite. The more expensive Brother MFC-J6945DW, which earned an Editors' Choice nod largely because of its low cost per page, also managed about 12ppm for our business applications suite. However, it was a bit slower than the WF-7310 for monochrome text, at 16.7ppm (36 seconds).

Output quality was top-tier across the board for a business inkjet. The fonts in our tests that are most likely to be used in standard business documents, including an italic font, were close to laser quality at sizes as small as 4 points. The only issues I saw were in heavily stylized fonts with thick strokes. Ink bleeding into the paper tended to close up small loops and the space between characters, making even 12-point size in one font far less readable than it should be. Keep in mind, however, that even some lasers have trouble maintaining readability for this particular font at sizes smaller than 10 points.

See How We Test Printers

The printer also handled graphics well, delivering nicely saturated, eye-catching color. It did a good job of holding thin lines, retaining even a one-pixel-wide line on a black background. I saw some barely visible hints of banding in dark fills, but had to look carefully to spot them. Photos on the recommended paper were about the same quality you'd get from having photos printed at a drugstore, which is a nice extra for a printer intended primarily for business use.

On our smudging tests, both black text and color graphics showed some smudges from gently wiping off a few drops of water; this was most obvious with black text. Photos on photo paper resisted smudging.

The standard-size ink cartridges are badly mismatched with the 500-sheet paper capacity. Ratings of 350 pages for black and 300 pages for each color guarantee you will run out of ink far more often than you need to load paper, and doubly so if you take advantage of duplex printing to print on both sides of the page.

Epson's XL cartridges offer less hassle and a lower cost per page. Both color and black XL cartridges are rated at 1,100 pages, and even better is the XXL size for black only, rated at 2,200 pages. If you use the XXL black cartridge and XL color cartridges, ink cost per page comes out to 3.3 cents for printing in black and 11.3 cents for color.

Other than the WF-7210 that it's replacing, the WF-7310's closest competitors are AIOs. If you never need to print at supertabloid size, the Editors' Choice–winning Brother MFC-J6945DW is well worth considering, with a low cost per page (particularly for printing in black) that can make it the least expensive printer in the long run if you print enough pages. If you need more robust printing at supertabloid size than the WF-7310 is suitable for, all of the other Epson models can hold 50 sheets of supertabloid paper. Among them, the Epson WF-7820 has the lowest paper capacity, making it the best choice for light- to medium-duty printing. The WF-7840 and EC-C7000 match for paper capacity but differ in AIO features, which you'll want to compare.

If you need a tabloid-size printer that can occasionally print at supertabloid size, and you don't need additional AIO functions, the WF-7310 is hard to beat. Its fast speed, paper capacity, and high-quality output are easily enough to make it our new Editors' Choice inkjet printer for tabloid-size printing, from light to heavy duty, in a micro or home office.

Designed for heavy-duty printing in a home or micro office, the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7310 delivers fast speed and impressive paper handling, printing on standard sizes up to 13 by 19 inches.

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M. David Stone is a freelance writer and computer industry consultant. He's a confirmed generalist, with writing credits on subjects as varied as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of a top company in the gaming industry. David has significant expertise in imaging technologies (including printers, monitors, large-screen displays, projectors, scanners, and digital cameras), storage (both magnetic and optical), and word processing.

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