Epson Stylus Office BX305F ink cartridges

The Epson BX 305F printer can accept cartridges from either the Fox range for medium usage or the larger capacity Apple range for heavier users. To obtain the lowest running costs for your BX305F we recommend purchasing the higher capacity Apple cartridges for use in this printer.

Epson BX305FW Review

Inkjet printers have got a low standing with regard to business printing. Run a highlighter pen on a key phrase of text and you're likely to end up having a smudgy mess. One or two raindrops may make ink-printed envelopes nearly unintelligible. Colour laser printers make a feasible approach but they are usually big, weighty and also expensive, and so exactly what is the solution? Epson bridges the gap between regular inkjet and laser printing using its resin-based DURABrite Ultra inks, which are virtually dry when they reach the paper and they are amazingly invulnerable to water, smudging as well as fading.

As an all-in-one printer intended for the small or home office, the BX305FW includes a wide range of business-like capabilities. In standalone mode, it is able to deal with mono or colour photocopying at the touch of a button but, in contrast to the majority of multi-function machines, it brings faxing to its repertoire. Better still, scanning, photocopying and faxing all benefit from a 30-sheet ADF (Auto Document Feeder) to make light of multi-sheet documents. There is in addition a neat and tidy row of assignable speed-dial buttons for five phone numbers. There's no need to be tied to the printer either, because the Epson is fully Wi-Fi certified along with carrying a typical USB 2.0 port. An additional nice touch is that you can fire off faxes from the BX305FW straight from your pc, without needing to print hard copies of your documents first. Whilst the on-board control interface is rather neat and tidy, making use of the Epson is not really all plain sailing. There's just a single, rear-mounted paper input tray, and this sits vertically that will cater to around 100 sheets of standard 80gsm paper. This means that if you wish to print on headed paper or perhaps envelopes, you must swap the paper around every time, and the same applies to photograph printing. Yet another letdown is that there is no USB port for the purpose of direct document printing coming from flash drives, plus there are no memory card readers either. An auto-duplex facility might have been beneficial too, because the instantaneously dry resin-based inks are fantastic for double-sided printing, however sad to say you need to switch every sheet over by hand.

Print rates of speed are a little bit poor for document printing, taking 14 seconds for a mono text page in addition to 58 seconds with respect to a mixed text and colour graphics DTP page in the testing. On the plus side, the machine doesn't have to have to wait for pages to dry when outputting multi-sheet documents, which in turn speeds things up in actual terms. Picture printing is rather slow, taking two minutes and 21 seconds to get a 6 x 4-inch print in standard photo quality mode as well as over 12 minutes with regard to an A4 photograph print in the best quality configuration. As a four-ink printer, photo quality is actually affected yet even taking into consideration the lack of colour space, it is especially weak on glossy photo paper, however quite satisfactory on plain paper.

As a combined printer, photocopier and fax machine, the device tends to make sense and the four Epson BX305FW ink cartridge DURABrite Ultra system creates rugged prints that happen to be water, smear and fade-resistant on plain paper. It is good to know you'll be able to print out critical business documents and they are going to remain looking top quality.

The BX305FW operates fairly well when it comes to basic printing, scanning, photocopying and faxing and its ULTRABrite Ultra inks create remarkably smudge-resistant prints. Nonetheless, it is deficient in several areas and a handful of additional features would have made it far more useful within the office.