At the time of writing the Epson WorkForce 840 is available only in the US, but we're expecting it to be available throughout Europe soon.
Highlights we can look forward to include the Epson WorkForce 840's plentiful paper handling and a touchscreen control panel. When matched against comparably well-equipped machines, the WorkForce 840 falls short of the HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus in speed and overall print quality. For its part, the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 has lower paper capacity, but supercheap black ink and a five-year warranty.
You can connect the Epson WorkForce 840 via USB, ethernet, or Wi-Fi, and the machine is easy to install. Note that if you opt for "first time" setup, you'll have to wade through a lot of dialog boxes that step you through unpacking, removing tape, hooking up cables, and the like. The walkthrough is useful if you don't know how to complete the process on your own; but skip it if you do.
The Epson WorkForce 840's touchscreen control panel comes with amber-lit controls that appear contextually - that is, only when needed. This feature is nicely done, though we sometimes missed the tactile feedback that real buttons provide. Also on board are CF, MS, SD, and XD memory card slots, as well as a USB/PictBridge port for offloading scans or for printing directly from cards.
The paper-handling features of this inkjet MFP are bountiful. Two 250-sheet input trays provide an outstanding amount of capacity. Automatic duplex (two-sided) printing is supported on both the PC and Mac. The A4 scanner has a 30-sheet ADF, and it can duplex-scan automatically. The only thing not supported was scanning from the unit to a PC over the network; you can perform that operation only via USB.
See also: Group test: what's the best printer?
Epson claims that the Epson WorkForce 840 is the world's fastest all-in-one. But in our tests, another Epson MFP, the WorkForce 520 was faster; the Epson B-510DN is the fastest inkjet of any kind that we've tested to date. Still, the WorkForce 840 prints very fast at default settings on plain paper. Monochrome pages of mostly plain text exit the printer at a swift 11.6 pages per minute on the PC and at 11.1 ppm on the Mac. From the PC, the WorkForce 840 printed a snapshot-size photo on letter-size plain paper in 12 seconds, which works out to a zippy 5 ppm. Once you switch to Epson's own photo paper and finer settings, however, the unit slows down considerably, to 69 seconds or 0.86 ppm for the same snapshot photo, and it took more than 2.5 minutes (0.4 ppm) to print a full-page photo on the Mac. Scans emerged slightly faster than on an average-speed MFP.
The Epson WorkForce 840's output quality fell a bit short on plain paper. Black-ink text samples looked dark but soft-edged - clearly the output of an inkjet, albeit a pretty good one, rather than of a laser. colour graphics look a little pale and pinkish. On Epson's own glossy photo paper, images improved noticeably, looking smooth and natural. colour copies and scans appeared accurate, though we saw some moiré in finer line patterns.
Ink costs for the WorkForce 840 range from reasonable to pretty inexpensive.
Comments
Matt Egan said: Thanks Rodney thats really helpful
RodneyH said: Forgot to add my location - I am in AustraliaRegardsRodney
RodneyH said: HI Jon MelissaI have just bought a Workforce 840 in Australia after returning an HP8500a wireless to the store because of continual paper feed problemsI agree that the text output is not quite up to 8500 standard but I am not concerned about that - its OK for me The EPSON 840 is good so far and has duplexing on the ADF as wellAlthough I have seen several reports that the 840 cannot copy to PC over wireless needs a USB connection - I think this may even be in the 840 documentation but cannot remember where you can in fact scan to PC via wireless at least with the 840 I haveWhen I purchased the 840 a few days ago I was somewhat dismayed that wireless scan to PC was not available believing the only choice was USBHowever whilst experimenting with settings I discovered that two PCs I had installed the Epson software on were visible on the 840 ScanScan to PC screen in addition to the USB Connection choiceScanning to these works - a smalll window opens on the target PC displaying scan progress and the file is stored in a subfolder created during software installation in the My Documents folderI have since installed the software on two other PCs rebooted each and OKd the unblocking of the Epson during the boot up process The operating systems are Win XP and Win Vista All PCs are selectable on the EPSON as scan to choicesI have no idea whether I have done anything special to achieve this There is NO usb cable connection - everything is wireless I have a USB jumpdrive in the USB front panel connection which I was setting up as a shared drive for access from other PCs because I thought that scan to PC was not available but it does in fact work for meHope this may help others to get the most from this printerKind regardsRodney