Epson’s offering to the business world, the B510DN is a colour inkjet printer that has low cost page per print like the laser printers. The B510DN is huge than a conventional inkjet Multifunction device (MFD), nearly the size of a laser printer. Hence, make sure to allocate some good real estate to the printer in your office.
The B510DN supports both USB and Ethernet connectivity. Installing the printer is simple, just plug in the Ethernet port or the USB port to your PC and switch on the printer. Install the driver from the accompanied drivers’ disk and you are ready to print. Being a network printer, it can be shared across workstations in your office. This again is an added advantage of the B510DN.
This black-grey coloured printer features high capacity CMYK ink cartridges that last for almost thousands of pages. Epson claims that the black cartridge can run for 4000 pages and colour ones provide 7000 pages of print.
Design-wise the B510DN features a protruding ink cartridge bay that is easy to access. On the right side of the printer, there is a dual line LCD that displays the status of the printer. There are two paper trays, front and rear. Both of them in total can hold up to 650 sheets of paper. Enough for a weeks’ printing for a SOHO or SME. The B510DN features auto-duplex printing functionality that can save paper for you with dual side printing.
Performance
The printer performed well in our tests. We tested the printer by printing some pictures, mixed documents (graphs and text) and plain text document. The printer is fast in printing the text pages. In the test, the printer printed the plain text documents at an average speed of 16 pages per minute (ppm). The printer prints the mixed page document at a speed of 2.5 ppm. We printed the high-resolution picture one of A4 size and the other a photo of 4×6 size. The A4 size picture took almost a minute to print at high resolution and the 4×6 photo took just 40 seconds to be on our hands.
Print quality was good for both text and pictures. Text as low as six point-size were clearly readable. There were no smudges at all. Photos printed on Glossy photo paper were vivid and had good colours. However, printing the same on plain paper, we noticed some grains.
In fact, Buyers Lab Inc., an independent authority and provider of competitive intelligence, testing and reviews on multifunction (MFP), copier, printer, scanner and software solutions and products has awarded the Epson B510DN as “Outstanding Achievement Award in Value,” due to its low cost per page. And we do definitely agree to this. The Epson B510DN retails for Rs.22,999.
Pros: High capacity ink cartridges, print quality, auto-duplex, Network printer
Cons: Large footprint, small display LCD
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