Epson’s WorkForce 600 Gives You Printing, Scanning and More — at a Great Price

Looking for an inexpensive, printer/scanner/copier/fax machine to round out your home office? You’ll be faced with many models to choose from, but perhaps none more value priced than the Epson WorkForce 600. You can get it for $199 directly from Epson.com and even cheaper from other online merchants. Need to save even more? Look for it used on Craigslist and other sites, where it has been spotted for less than a hundred bucks.

The WorkForce is, well, a workhorse. Granted, it’s not the best at anything that it does. It can’t rival the world’s greatest color printers, scanners, copies or fax machines. But it’s all-around features and great price makes it an ideal choice for the part-time entrepreneur working out of a home office. That isn’t to say that the WorkForce 600 wouldn’t fit well in a pure business enviornment such as say, a small insurance office. It will hold its own there, too, with ink-jet speeds of up to 38 pages per minute in draft mode. That makes the WorkForce nearly as fast as some laser printers, with the added advantage of being able to produce superior ink-jet photos. It offers brilliant color output and Epson backs it with a two-year warranty.

It’s also equipped with Wi-Fi, Ethernet and USB connectivity, and can be linked to a single computer or configured to serve a small workgroup. The wireless function is one of its greatest strenghts, and is a snap to configure with the setup disk. It’s great to be able to sit at the kitchen table with a wireless laptop and print to the printer in the den without having to get up. A 2.5-inch LCD screen flips out on a panel, allowing easy access to controls for all its functions.

Overall, the WorkForce 600 remains one of the fastest ink-jet printers even though it has been on the market for a while. It’s reliable as a fax machine, and offers quality photo printing and scanning. As a copier, it’s fine if you you only need to make a few copies at a time. You’ll find it lagging if you have high copy volume.

These days there isn’t anything really sexy about printers and copiers. They have been around so long that they’re pretty much taken for granted. That’s probably a good thing for the WorkForce 600. It’s not all that glamorous, but does get the job done — like a workhorse.