Continuous Ink System for Epson Workforceâ® Wf 7710 Wide format All in one Printer

The Epson WorkForce WF-7710 Wide-Format All-in-One Printer ($249.99) is a super-tabloid all-in-one (AIO) capable of borderless prints up to 13 by 19 inches. It also scans, copies, and faxes up to tabloid size (11 by 17 inches). However, the WF-7710 costs significantly more to use than our Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J6935DW, and its paper capacity is less than half. It's worth considering the WF-7710 if you need to print super-tabloid size pages (the Brother model can only handle up to tabloid size), but otherwise, the Epson is a perfectly good printer that faces some very stiff competition.

An Impressive Feature Set

Measuring 13.4 by 22.3 by 32.2 inches (HWD) and weighing 40.8 pounds, the WF-7710 ($1,199.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) can hold 251 sheets via a 250-sheet paper tray up front and a 1-sheet override tray on the back. It's essentially the same printer as its sibling, the WorkForce WF-7720, minus one 250-sheet paper tray. The Brother MFC-J6935DW, on the other hand, supports 600 sheets, from three sources, while the HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 holds 500 and the HP OfficeJet Pro 7720 holds 501.

The WF-7710's monthly duty cycle is 20,000 pages (same as the WF-7720). That's 10,000 pages less than the HP 7720, the HP 7740, and the Brother MFC-J6935DW. In addition, the WF-7710 comes with a single-pass auto-duplexing 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for sending two-sided multipage documents to the scanner. (Both the HP 7740 and the Brother MFC-J6935DW also come with single-pass duplexing ADFs.) All these ADFs hold pages up to tabloid size, except the 7720's, which supports only large as legal size.

Similar Products

An advantage of Epson wide-format printers is that most of them print at the larger 13-by-19-inch format, whereas most others top out at 11 by 17 inches. Those extra inches provide a substantially larger print area for your spreadsheets and promotional flyers.

Some of the few improvements Epson made from the WF-7610, which the WF-7710 replaces, is the larger (4.3-inch, up from 3.5-inch) touch screen, and a reworked, more attractive control panel. The larger screen, of course, makes poking options on the screen easier, and the entire control panel itself has a much nicer, high-tech look and feel about it.

Making Connections

Like its more-expensive two-drawer sibling, the WF-7710 comes with just about every connectivity option available, including Ethernet 10/100bps, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, connecting to a single PC via USB, and near-field communication, or NFC. Wi-Fi Direct and NFC are peer-to-peer network protocols for connecting the printer to your mobile devices without either it or them being part of a local network.

A few mobile apps in the company's Epson Connect bundle are included: Email Print, Epson Remote Print, Epson iPrint, and Epson Cloud Print, as well as built-in support for a few third-party mobile solutions, such as Apple AirPrint and Google Cloud Print. In addition, you can connect to several other cloud sites via iPrint and workflow profiles on the control panel.

If all those options aren't enough, you can also print from and scan to a USB thumb drive; the USB port is located on the right-front section of the chassis, beside the paper tray.

Better Than Acceptable Performance

Epson rates the WF-7710 at 18 pages per minute (ppm) for single-sided monochrome pages, and 10ppm for color, which is on par with many of its competitors, except that in this case our test unit had a little trouble making its rating (as did the WF-7720). I tested it over Ethernet on our standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional. When printing our simply formatted monochrome 12-page Microsoft Word document, it scored 14.7ppm, or 3.3ppm slower than its rating.

See How We Test Printers

That's close to the WF-7720's score (which, at 14.4ppm, isn't a screamer, either), about 9ppm slower than the HP 7740 and the HP 7720, and about 2ppm pages behind the Brother MFC-J6935DW. When I combined these scores with those from printing our several colorful graphics- and image-laden PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint business documents, the Epson WF-7710's score dropped by half, to 7.2ppm. That's about what I would expect for this class of inkjet AIO. The WF-7720 and the HP 7720, for example, scored about the same, and the HP 7740 was 2.5ppm faster. Brother's MFC-J6935DW, on the other hand, beat the WF-7710 by almost 5ppm.

Finally, to test how quickly the WF-7710 prints photographs, I ran our two color-rich and highly detailed 4-by-6-inch snapshots through it several times, clocking and averaging the results. The WF-7710 printed our test snapshots in 29 seconds, 4 seconds slower than the WF-7720. The Brother MFC-J6935DW came in 23 seconds faster, and the HP 7720 and the HP 7740 were just a few seconds slower.

Good-Looking Output Overall

Aside from some slight flaws in a couple of the test Excel charts and PowerPoint handouts we print, I've no real complaints about the Epson WF-7710's output. On the myriad sample text pages I printed, everyday serif and sans-serif fonts looked terrific, with well-shaped characters from about 6 points upward. Larger headline sizes, and even some of the decorative typefaces we print during testing, looked better than average. If what you print comprises mostly text, the WF-7710's output should work well in most business settings.

Business graphics, too, looked good, for the most part. I did see some minor banding in some of the darker backgrounds and gradients, as well as some color shifting from lighter tints to darker ones, but hardly enough to render the documents as unacceptable, except for, perhaps, the most exacting artwork designed for engaging clients.

Photo quality is decent, with good detail overall and spot-on colors, though some of our test images from the WF-7710 came out looking a little dull and washed out, even when I printed them at the highest setting on the premium glossy paper Epson sent me. It's not that the photo output is in unacceptable. It's just that I've seen significantly brighter and more vibrant colors from several other inkjet printers, especially those dubbed by their manufacturers as "photo" printers, such as Epson's own Expression Premium ET-7750 EcoTank Wide-Format All-in-One Supertank Printer ($1,120.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) . It, too, prints up to 13-by-19-inch pages.

Too-High Running Costs

Due to fierce competition, the per-page cost of ink has been trending downward on most AIOs. Unfortunately, the WF-7710 is not one of them. When you buy the company's maximum-yield ink cartridges, you'll pay 3.2 cents for monochrome pages and 11.4 cents for color pages. Among the other wide-format printers discussed here, these are the highest running costs of the bunch (tied with its sibling, the WF-7720).

The HP 7720's running costs, by comparison, are 2.1 cents for monochrome pages and 8.1 cents for color pages. The Brother MFC-J6935DW, one of that company's INKvestment models (where you pay more up front for larger-yield tanks that save money in the long run) delivers monochrome pages for just less than 1 cent each, and color pages for less than 5 cents.

You can get even lower running costs by opting for Epson's own WorkForce ET-16500 EcoTank Wide-Format All-in-One Supertank Printer. But you should consider this one only if you plan to print hundreds, perhaps even thousands of pages each month, as it lists for $999.99. With running costs at less than 1 cent for both monochrome and color pages, though, it won't take long to make up that huge purchase price difference.

Running With the Pack

The bottom line: The Epson WorkForce WF-7710 is a fine printer with formidable competition, and its WF-7720 sibling, at just $50 more, is a better value. And making matters worse, the next step up, its WF-7720 sibling, at just $50 more, is a better value. At this point, you may be thinking that $50 is a lot of money for just an additional drawer, but consider the increased paper-handling options that extra cassette gives you, such as the ability to keep both letter-size and tabloid-size (or whatever combination you want) sheets loaded at the same time. If you don't need super-tabloid-size prints, an even better value is the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J6935DW. It costs more up front, but its low running cost will save you cash in the long run.

Epson WorkForce WF-7710 Wide-Format All-in-One Printer

The Bottom Line

The Epson WorkForce WF-7710 prints, copies, and scans wide-format pages with ease, but it doesn't quite stand up to its formidable competition.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/epson-workforce-wf-7710-wide-format-all-in-one-printer

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