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Epson’s WorkForce Pro WF-5110DW is a single-function inkjet printer in a colour laser’s clothes. Optimised for plain paper printing, it makes no concessions to more traditional inkjet roles: there are no memory card slots for photo printing, and borderless printing isn’t even supported.
The printer is more than suited to churning out page after page in a busy home or small office, though. The printer supports wired and wireless networking, various mobile and Cloud print options, and can automatically print on each side of a sheet of paper (duplex printing). Standard paper handling comprises a 250-sheet cassette with an 80-sheet multipurpose tray, while a second 250-sheet cassette is available.
Although some colour lasers might require up to 10 or 11 consumables, the WF-5110DW takes just five: four ink cartridges and one so-called maintenance box – essentially just a drip tray to catch any waste ink. At under £20 and rated for 50,000 pages, this box adds less than a tenth of a penny to print costs.
Ink cartridges are available in three sizes, but unusually the most generous – rated for 4,000 pages each – work out slightly more expensive per page than the XL range (rated for 2,600 black and 2,000 colour pages). Using XL cartridges, costs are about 4.2p for a page of mixed text and colour graphics – far less than an equivalent colour laser.
With no fuser unit to heat, electricity costs should be lower, too: we measured a peak of just 20 watts. After running our entire suite of tests, the printer’s energy use was below 10 watt-hours. For comparison, the same tests on HP’s LaserJet Pro M451dn colour laser consumed 40 watt-hours.
It’s clear that the WF-5110DW has advantages over competing lasers, but our test unit reminded us that inkjets have their disadvantages, too; when the printer first arrived we had to run three head-cleaning cycles to remove gaps in the black printout.
After this, however, print quality was simply excellent. Black text was bold, sharp and, to the naked eye, a match for laser output. Colour prints were a real surprise even on standard office paper, with fantastic strong colours and little evidence of grain. Like most inkjets, the WF-5110DW prints with less ink during duplexing to avoid smudging, but the results were only slightly fainter.
In terms of print speeds, the WF-5110DW isn’t far off the pace of an equivalent laser – and it’s faster than some. It delivered our 25-page text test at 18.8 pages per minute (ppm), and even managed 7.5ppm on our colour graphics test.
Its quick 11-second time-to-first-page will be a further advantage on shorter jobs. Cheap, with rapid, excellent prints, very low running costs and a three-year warranty, the only reason not to choose the WorkForce Pro WF-5110DW is if you need a USB host port, or if you insist on prints that have the sheen of a laser’s toner. For the rest of us, it’s a clear Best Buy.
