Epson Stylus Office B40W review

Epson's no-frills Stylus Office B40W is a sleek, simple and compact business inkjet.

You can install high-yield ink cartridges that will print 995 black and 815 colour pages. The black T1001 cartridge costs around £17, meaning a mono print costs just 1.7p. That's cheaper than many mono laser printers that cost under £100. The B40W has great networking capabilities, too, with WiFi and Ethernet in addition to the usual USB port.

The printer has only a few buttons: one to load paper, another to cancel print jobs, a third to change the ink and another to enable or disable the wireless radio. Unlike many recent single-function inkjets, the Stylus Office B40W has a fixed print head built into the printer. This is inconvenient if nozzles get clogged, as it will require time and ink to clean. However, this is unlikely if you use your printer regularly.

This is a business printer, so Epson doesn't expect it to be used much for printing 6x4in holiday snaps. This doesn't excuse the B40W's poor loading of 6x4in paper, as it claims to be able to print borderless images up to A4. It took quite a bit of trial and error to position our 6x4in sheets so they could be loaded without either slipping out of position or being trapped by the adjustable paper support. Once we'd resolved this, photo quality was good. Even drab brown and grey shades were richly reproduced, but solid areas of dark colour had a slight reddish tint and some 10x8in prints were fuzzy around the edges. Photos printed slowly, at around three minutes per 6x4in print, but a typical photo costs just 20p including paper.

A4 plain paper prints were blisteringly fast. At 13.6ppm for standard-quality mono text, the B40W rivals some personal laser printers. The sharp lettering is similarly impressive. Draft prints are even faster at 16.1ppm, but suffer from jagged, pixelated text. Smooth, solid colour documents printed at standard quality emerged at a respectable 4ppm.

The B40W is capable and inexpensive to run, but it can't quite rival HP's Officejet 6000, which cost even less to buy and run.