Customer Reviews

Epson WorkForce 40 Wireless Color Printer (C11CA27201)

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Epson has a very nice printer in the Workforce 40. It won't suit the needs of a large work group in a busy office with heavy printing requirements, but it's just perfect in a home/home office/small office environment.

I was a little reluctant to set up this wireless printer myself (I almost asked my friend, the geek, to come do it for me) but it was actually quite simple. The quick start guide is very clear and the on screen instructions are quite precise. I had the printer up and running on two computers, one running Windows XP and the other Vista Home Premium, within 30 minutes of opening the box.

The first page out time isn't spectacularly fast, but the succeeding pages print very quickly. Epson claims up to 27ppm, which is probably not too far from what I'm seeing.

The print quality is excellent. Not laser quality, but pretty darn close. It also prints photos very nicely; not as nice as my big $$$ Epson R1800, but I didn't expect it too, either. The photo quality is just fine for family photos.

All-in-all, I'm very pleased with this printer. A wireless printer, with this quality and at this price point is a real bargain.

I have used a fair number of inkjet printers, both home/personal models and office models, from Lexmark, HP, and Epson for about 20 years. I gave up on the HPs early because most of them are designed to roll the paper sharply over a roller, which causes me problems with the card stock and some label forms I need to use. Lexmark seems to prefer combo color ink cartidges which in my experience always need to be replaced early if I have printed a single color a low on recent documents. For these reasons I prefer Epson inkjets for my home office.

I have over the last few years gone through a couple Stylus series color inkjets. The most recent one used six ink cartridges and did a nice job. Its downsides were very slow cartridge priming whenever I tried printing after more than a few days if disuse (slow x 6!), fairly slow basic printing (i.e. black and white text). This machine used an ink system that did NOT have the print head on the cartidges, but rather used a single common printhead that was fed by tubes from the ink cartidges. This meant that a clogged or damaged print head was not replaced when changing cartridges. This is what finally caused me to retire the printer; it got to a point where no amount of ink purging operations would restire proper printing.

There are fewer stand alone inkjet printers these days, in part because multifunction printers have somewhat taken over, and partly because laser printers, both black & white as well as color, are now very affordable. I was suprised to find how few models were available from the big manufacturers.

Presented with few choices from Epson, I decided to try the new series called "Workforce". I got this model for around $75, which included full color cartridges (it uses three instead of the five required by the older printer) and a double sized black cartridge. You can buy high capacity color cartridges directly from Epson, but they are not the once included and they are not sold in stores, for some perverse reason.

The printer looks sharp, with its sexy gloss black finish sporting silver highlights. That is, it looks sexy for the first week, then once comes to realize that this finish shows dust readily and quickly, and fingerprints are worse. There were some advantages after all to those ubiquitous beige matte finish machines of old!

The paper exit tray has four sections, which all need to be telescoped out for use, then telescoped back when not in use (if you have a large enough desktop you can leave this tray unfurled), but the parts don't slide smoothly, so it takes a bit of jiggling to make them work.

The really advantages of this printer are the extra ink capacity, promising fewer cartridge changes, and its great printing speed. In 'normal' print mode (text only), it is approximately 2 seconds per page, or 30 pages per minutes. Some other folks have said the printer is noisy; I find that it is noisy because the paper and print head moving that fast are bound to make sounds. If I print at lower speeds, such as for top quality text printing or for photos, it is almost whisper quiet. But I do love to see the paper shooting out of this machine. One of my tasks includes printing up stacks of 'donation' envelopes for a charitable organization...printers of this size can typically hold only 10 envelopes or so in their input trays, and this one is no differnt....but before I had to sit patiently while each group of 10 printed before loading the next group of 10....now they come out so fast I am still pulling the next set of 10 from the box while the printer has finished with the last 10.

The printer also has a set of driven tiny star wheels in the exit path, and these help control and pull paper through near the end of the sheet. Still, only one of these engages narrow paper such as envelopes, so I find that the very fast paper speed coupled with the single contact point of the drive allows the paper to skew slightly. The speedy envelope printing I mentioned earlier does result in the text being very slightly skewed. You would not notice this by itself, by in my case the text on the envelope is cordered with the thin-lined rectangle, and it is possible to see the jags in the line that should be straight. This does NOT happen when feeding full width paper.

The printer, for some reason, turns ON much fater than other Epson inkjets I have used in the past. The others liked to do a little break-dance and might not be ready to print for as long as a couple of minutes. The Workforce 40 never seems to need more than a few seconds, at least in my experience.

The printer also has a cute way of telling you things about the cartridges, such as if one is empty..it moves the carriage so that the problem cartridge aligns with a little arrow on the printer body under the cover.

Black and white text printing is crisp and clean. The color photos I have printed look like what I would expect from a personal level inkjet printer, in other words very good without being quite professional grade.

I have not used this printer with any connection method other than USB, so I cannot talk about Ethernet or wireless operation, but it is nice to have all these options built in for such a lot price.

In short, I think Epson has done a nice job on this printer and at the price it would be hard to fins any significant points to complain about.

I bought this printer five months ago. I use a MacBook, my wireless router is under the sofa in the living room, and I needed a printer in a convenient place in my office. The Workplace 40 is ideal for this situation.

I print TEXT DOCUMENTS every day, and the Workforce 40 does a FABULOUS job at this, using only black ink, which I can buy in extra-large tanks. The WIRELESS CONNECTION, though a PAIN TO SET UP, WORKS FLAWLESSLY. I press Print, and by the time I get to the printer, the first page is printed, and subsequent pages follow at a page every few seconds. Long documents (10 pages or more) blast out while I wait. Documents print beautifully: CLEAR, CRISP TYPE, AND GOOD DOCUMENT COLOR WHEN NEEDED. Life was a dream with this printer. Till I needed to print some CD case art.

I printed five CD SLEEVES -- two sides each, nothing more -- on matte presentation paper. That NEARLY EXHAUSTED ALL INK CARTRIDGES, which had shown no depletion at all before, with hundreds of pages printed. I buy brand ink, because I trust Epson to feed its printers good ink with true color and that won't clog the heads. Set of four standard cartridges: $55. Very expensive CD covers. Lesson learned: Matte presentation paper uses LOTS of ink. If you buy this printer, DON'T USE THE MATTE PAPER SETTING. Then I printed a page of photos. OMG! Run Away Screaming!

Life got far worse when I needed to print a bunch of PHOTOS for a Christmas gift. DISASTER. WORST PRINTER, BY FAR, that I have ever seen for printing photos. Hi-res photos look like cell phone photos with DROPUTS, SCAN LINES, AND GLARING GREENISH COLOR. I studied the suggested settings for the Kodak Ultra paper I used. I followed the directions carefully and set the printer settings as suggested, because I expect photos to look like photos. I cannot emphasize this too much: THIS PRINTER PRINTS HORRIBLE PHOTOS. I despaired. Fortunately, my partner has an old, beat-up Canon IP4000, which printed the same file of photos perfectly from Photoshop Elements. I used to have a Canon i850, the death of which prompted me to buy this Epson. I used that Canon to death as a SEMI-PRO PHOTOGRAPHER a few years ago. Canon spoiled me for printing photos. If you want to print photos, and you CAN'T AFFORD A REAL EPSON PHOTO PRINTER, BUY A CANON.

BUT, if you print ONLY TEXT DOCUMENTS, need a WIRELESS PRINTER, and have a BACKUP PRINTER FOR PRINTING PHOTOS, the Workforce 40 is an EXCELLENT PRINTER. Fast, trouble-free, and conservative with ink.

I just spent an hour and a half on the phone with Epson technical support to finally come to a resolution that my type of wireless network (WPA2) is NOT one of the networks this printer works with because WPA2 is private. Their recommendation was to change my network to allow for the printer to be supported. How about they change their settings or offer a software update to accommodate the customer, not the other way around. I'm not about to fuss with my established private secured network for a printer.

Not only was this product a complete waste, but I just wasted 84 minutes of my time on the phone with a not friendly nor helpful technical support agent!

Advice: Check your network before committing to this printer. No where was I advised prior to my purchase that I needed a specific type of wireless network already set-up.

Note: This product does NOT support WPA2 networks

Bless Epson for actually including a written manual! What a luxury these days!

Set-up to my Mac Airport Extreme wireless hub was so easy. INCLUDED in the box is an ethernet cable that can be detached after set up to go wireless . My desktop and notebook speak to this printer without hitches. Everything about this set up was so much easier than when I tried it with an HP. Print is very crisp.

There is even an EXTRA HIGH capacity black cartridge in the box. The color cartridges are the regular size. Buyers should know that larger versions of those cartridges are available from the Epson website if your needs lean in that direction. The Epson ink is also highlighter friendly - no smearing. The first page takes just a bit longer because the nozzles on the cartridges are being charged. After that all moves quickly. My needs are not photo oriented, but more of personal office type printing. There are Epsons with broader ink choices for pro hard core photo use. But this does print very nice snapshots. Here again Epson is a step up - the inks are formulated to make your photos very long lasting.

Epson WorkForce 40 Wireless Color Printer (Black) (C11CA27201)

First the positive: the wireless setup was easy, the printer looks nice (hard to find small wireless printers these days), and the print quality of text is excellent and of images is very good.

Now the negative: It feels cheap. Very thin and flimsy plastic that I can't imagine lasting long in a small business environment.

Now the really bad (why I returned it): They lied. The Amazon page for this product says "Built-in 2 sided printing." Any reasonable person would understand this to mean that the printer has built-in duplexing. But this isn't the case. Instead, what they mean is that you can choose "two sided" printing from print options and the printer will print one page of the document, spit out the paper and allow you to put it back in to print on the other side. This is called "manual duplexing" and has been available with every printer for quite a long time. This advertising is misleading, but it's not Amazon's fault, it's what Epson advertises on their site as well. Total, total nonsense.

Very good product; easy setup and excellent printing. Very nice wireless feature that lets you print from several computers on your network. Also allows printing from your wireless laptop.

Summary: Very noisy. Uses ink ( expensive ) like crazy. On a Macintosh, Epson designed their driver with a pop-up window to indicate ink levels. You cannot, according to Epson support, disable this feature. If you are using this printer in a business environment, EVERY time you print an invoice, statement, etc. the pop-up appears. To move on to a new record you have to click out of the pop-up or wait for the print job to finish ! No double side printing on Mac. Print characters often look smudged or misaligned when printing at high speed. This printer is hardly acceptable for a college dorm let alone a business printer as Epson advertises ! I purchased 3 of these pieces of junk...
like an idiot I kept trying to make these work and exceeded the 30 day return agreement.
Do not make my mistake.

I bought this printer because the reviews at the time were good, it was small, print quality was decent, and it was relatively cheep. Here's the problem. There is a manufacturing flaw. The chips inside the printer will often think that your ink cartriges are empty when they are not, think they are full when they are empty, and will not register when you have place a new cartrige in the slot. I have spent over $200 in buying cartriges that I thought were bad only to find that the problem was the printer itself.

Buyer Beware. Look into this problem before you consider buying. The cheep price is not worth what you will waste in ink.

So far this printer seems very good. I've only used it a little but a page of text printed from Word (wirelessly) in under 3 seconds I estimate.

What I didn't see on this page before buying it is that it DOES NOT SHIP with a USB cable. If you want to print by plugging it directly into your computer you'll need to buy your own cable. That said, it does ship with a network (ethernet) cable and if you've got a router you could still print over the (wired) network if you wanted to.

I'm a complete novice when it comes to networking in general and of most details under the hood of Windows specifically, and it took me probably about 45 minutes to get the wireless printing up and running. The instruction book is very precise except that there are 2-3 missing steps between steps 5 and 6. (The steps occur on screen but are not printed in the book.) Luckily it wasn't difficult to figure out which buttons to press to make it work.

When I first started reading the booklet on how to install wireless printing I was a little confused and intimidated because they ask you to write down your "WEP" code (or something like that). I had no idea what this was and they mentioned it a couple times so I was worried. However, no need to worry, all you need to know is the name of your wireless network (which it will detect anyway) and your password for that network.

The basic process for getting wireless printing up and running is that you plug the printer into your wireless router using the network cable. (Apparently you can also plug it into your computer with the network cable too, but I didn't do it that way.) Once it's plugged in then you go to your computer, mine is a completely wireless laptop, and do all the configuration there. So it's funny, the printer was wired into the network but my computer was wireless and I configured it and then when I was done I unplugged the printer and voila, I could print wirelessly. With the help of their instruction book it is painless.

I recommend this printer.