The Epson WorkForce 310 All-In-One last year, stood out for providing a complete set of office-centric features at a considerably low price. That was enough to make it a great fit for micro-and home office with light printing needs. This year’s Workforce 520, delivers the same full range of office-centric features and adds WiFi at the same price. (Despite the jump in the model number, Epson says it is the direct replacement for the 310.)

Unfortunately for Epson, the 520 faces stronger competition than the 310 did when it was introduced, including the similarly priced Lexmark Interpret S405 and the slightly less expensive HP Officejet 4500 All-in-One. Given that competition puts it in the category of the still considerable but less impressive for the price.

Like the WorkForce 310 WorkForce 520 before it can print, scan and fax, even over a network, and can work as a standalone copier and fax. It also allows you an e-mail from the front menu commands, automatically launch an e-mail on your PC and adding the scanned document attached.

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Office-centric features include a fax next 30-page automatic document feeder (ADF) for easy scanning multi-page documents such as legal-size pages that are too big for the flatbed. And for offices with wired networks, the printer offers an Ethernet jack and WiFi. What you will not find on the 520 are photo-centric features for use at home. No PictBridge port, for example, and no way to print from a USB stick or memory card.

You will not find much in the way of paper handling, which is the main factor which limits the 520 light print, even in the context of a micro-or home office. The input tray holds only 100 sheets, meaning that if you print more than about 20 pages per day (including copies and faxes), then you add paper more than once a week, often enough for some people to consider it annoying. In much the same vein, the absence of an automatic two-sided duplex a problem if you often. However, the Manual duplex feature in the driver is suitable for occasional duplex. So if you do not have enough print for the limited capacity of the paper to bother you, and you do not very often, the duplex paper handling is no problem.

The 520 output quality is not a strong point. In fact, the paragraph for an inkjet quality across the board. More than half the fonts in our text suite qualified as both easily readable and well formed at 8 points, but fewer than half passed both thresholds at 6 points, and none passed both at smaller sizes.

Moreover, a font that you could opt for the standard business documents needed 20 points to pass both tests, and the text in general had a slightly grayish look, instead of a crisp, dark black. Overall, the text is acceptable for day-to-day business documents, but I would not use the printer, say, a report to an important client when I wanted a sense of professionalism across.

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Graphics quality was good enough for most internal business needs, but I would hesitate to the printer for a full page PowerPoint handouts or something. For images that do not cover the entire page, you may or may not take into account the quality good enough to hand out to prospective customers or clients, depending on how much of a perfectionist you are.

Several full-page images in our test suite showed uneven fills in dark colors with light areas near the top of the landscape page, and an image with a black background showed thin white lines across the entire image. Another problem for the full-page graphics that you may need to spend extra for a heavy paper. The ink tends to the plain paper we use in our tests curls. Images that do not cover the entire page is not affected by most of these problems, but they still showed visible dithering in the form of graininess. On the positive side, the printer did well to preserve thin lines that disappear from most printers’ output.

Picture quality is far below par for an inkjet. A few photos in our test suite qualified as true photo quality and some were close, but others were also short of the mark. A black and white photo prints with an unacceptable tint, for example, in a photo that included apples in a fruit bowl, the apples were a red color that was not even close to anything that exists in nature. The apples had a flat look, which comes from a loss of subtle color gradations that she would look more three dimensional.

Despite problems with some of the photos, most were easily good enough to tack on an office bulletin board or a refrigerator door, and photos on plain paper were more than adequate for typical business use, like printing Web pages with photos.

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Although the WorkForce 520 is not as impressive as its predecessor, it’s still a more than reasonable choice. It is cheap, relatively fast, delivers quality output that is suitable for most business needs, and offers all the features of the MFP you probably need in a micro-or home office. Also worth mention is the one year warranty, which is seen as a little plus. If the 520 stops working during the warranty, Epson will ship a replacement printer, along with a return label, Epson’s picking up the costs in both directions.

If you are considering the WorkForce 520 and you do not have WiFi, you would be able to find a workforce to 310 at a lower price before it vanishes. (It is still available at this writing, even if it is no longer manufactured.) You should also take a look at the Officejet 4500 and Lexmark S405. But keep in mind that each of the competitors has its own advantages. If you connect to a wired network and you care about print speeds staff 520 is probably your preference.

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