List Price: $129.99
Sale Price: $89.00
Today's Bonus: 32% Off
Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program This unit was tested on a Windows 7 Home Premium desktop workstation.
SHORT REVIEW OF NON-SCANNING FEATURES:
Yes, this does have a small footprint, but note the extra 6 inches of height and 3 inches of depth needed when trays are extended for printing. Setup was easy, though if you know what you're doing, I recommend connecting the printer to your wireless network BEFORE you install the software on CD to your PC you can then just say "printer is already on network" when prompted during installation. I tested ALL advertised features (including AirPrint and send and receiving FAX) and was able to get them all working to varying degrees. Per page printing costs are fairly standard for an inkjet (7-10 cents per page black and white; 20-25 cents for color including nicer photo paper). Speed is "quick" and not "super fast." Big batch jobs will still require a laser printer. To keep the size of this review reasonable, I'll leave it to other reviews to supply more specifics other than scanning features.
SCANNING FEATURES:
Note that there is a less expensive version of this printer, the Epson WorkForce WF-2530 which is virtually identical to the WF-2540 being reviewed here. The one major difference in the scanning features, discussed below, is that the cheaper WF-2530 does not have an external USB interface. This means that the WF-2530 must be attached to a computer by wifi or USB cable in order to scan. Otherwise, other than the extra interface option for an ethernet connection and a slightly different control display on the WF-2540 being reviewed here, it appears to be identical in size, speed, and function.
That being said, one of the best features of this all-in-One (WF-2540) is that it does have that external USB port. This actually allows the unit to be a stand-alone, non-attached, non-networked scanning station. If your workstation breaks, your network goes down, or you run out of ink, you can still scan documents to a USB drive and take them elsewhere to print, email, or whatever. As well, you can use as a stand-alone photocopier.
The second best feature for scanning is the automatic document feeder (ADF). It can hold only 30 pages, and was a little finicky when I used thicker source paper to scan. Still, ADF's are a great feature for an inexpensive all-in-one unit like this. Note that if you scan directly from the control panel of the unit, your only choices are 200, 300, and 600 dpi resolution, and either PDF or jpeg formats only. The PDF is NOT searchable with no default of optical character recognition (OCR). The included ABBYY software cannot convert non-searchable PDFs to searchable (OCRed) PDFs. If you save scans as jpeg images the included ABBYY software CAN load and convert jpegs to searchable PDFs.
Using the workstation as a stand-alone scanner, I was able to create and store to attached USB drive a 5 page pdf document scanned at 200 dpi in color mode in 160 seconds (32 seconds/page). The same test document scanned at 600 dpi in color mode took 260 seconds (52 seconds/page). Rule of thumb would be 30-60 seconds per page depending on resolution.
Using the included EPSON Scan software, which runs on your computer, you can choose from a larger number of options than the limited ones from the control panel of the printer. E.g., you can set resolution from 60-9200 dpi, choose color smoothing, set to scan in gray scale, etc..
Scanning speed with a wireless connection varied greatly depending upon how far the WF-2540 is from your wifi router wifi connection speed and strength is critical. Using the same 5 page document and the EPSON Scan software with the WF-2540 in wireless mode, I needed 20 minutes to produce a document when the unit was 50 feet away from my wifi router. Moving the WF-2540 to about 20 feet away, the same job took about 8 minutes. Connected with a USB cable to my PC, the same job took about 6 minutes. It was STILL much slower than the direct scan to attached USB device.
Rule: scanning and creating documents via wifi WILL be slower, and with a weaker wifi connection can be unusably slow. Consider how far your WF-2540 will be from your wifi router.
I give this 5 stars for being an excellent small office solution with a lot of built in flexibility (especially the USB scan and store capability). Connect by ethernet, wifi network, USB cable, or use as a stand-alone scan, copy or fax unit and you're ready to go.
0 comments:
Post a Comment