The further you work your way up the Epson WorkForce Pro product line, the more impressive these high-volume all-in-one inkjets get. Over the past couple of years, we’ve awarded several WorkForce Pro models our Editors’ Choice award. Most recently, these were the WorkForce Pro WF-4630 Network Multifunction Printer (which earned a very rare perfect five stars) and the WorkForce Pro WF-5690 Network Multifunction Color Printer With PCL/Adobe PS.
Review Multifunction Color Printer Epson WorkForce Pro WF-6590 Network
Why did these particular high-end, high-volume printers score so high? For a number of reasons, but foremost: These are fast, robust machines with exceptional print quality and a highly competitive per-page cost of operation.
Add to that group the subject of our review today.
Epson WorkForce Pro WF-6590 (Left Angle)
The $549.99-list WorkForce Pro WF-6590 Network Multifunction Color Printer is, with its 75,000-page monthly “duty cycle” and potential capacity of up to 1,580 sheets, an extremely well-built and capable all-in-one. (The monthly duty cycle is the number of pages the manufacturer says you can print each month without causing undue wear and tear on the machine.)
Essentially a replacement for (or an alternative to) a laser printer, this PrecisionCore-based workhorse comes with just about every convenience and productivity feature appropriate to this level of high-volume multifunction printer (MFP). As we’ve pointed out in past reviews of PrecisionCore-based MFPs, they hold some key advantages over laser and laser-class (LED) machines, including significantly lower power consumption, the ability to print higher-quality photographs, and—especially—a much lower cost per page for color prints, as we’ll get into in a later section of this review.
Midrange and high-volume laser models tend to churn out black-and-white pages at reasonable per-page costs, but printing color pages on them often costs two to three times as much as the same pages would on a WorkForce Pro or some other competitive high-volume inkjet, such as HP’s venerable, PageWide-based Officejet X576dw. Our point is that this WorkForce Pro model, several of its siblings, as well as HP’s PageWide Officejet X models outpace comparably priced laser MFPs in many ways.
For the most part, the WF-6590 is the next step up from the WF-5690 (which lists for $150 less), with capabilities and volumes increased by roughly a third. For example, the cheaper model has a 45,000-page monthly duty cycle, compared to the WF-6590’s 75,000 pages. Furthermore, the WF-6590’s print speed is slightly higher, rated at 24 pages per minute (ppm), as opposed to the smaller model’s 20ppm. Copy and scan speeds are somewhat faster, too.
In brief, as we said about the WorkForce Pro WF-5690 a while back, the WorkForce Pro WF-6590 is an excellent high-volume MFP, as are the other WorkForce models listed in the previous paragraphs. They are ideal picks if you need large amounts of text (and don’t require true laser quality), as well as a good bit of color printing with photo-output quality that beats what you’ll get on any color laser. The good news is that whichever WorkForce Pro model you select, each one delivers a very low cost per page for both of those kinds of output. As we see it, any of them will do a good job—you just need to decide on how much volume you need.
Now, nobody buys a hulking office MFP for its good looks. But as office machines go, the WF-6590 is fairly attractive—albeit big for an inkjet MFP.
At 20.3 inches across, 29.8 inches from front to back, 21.3 inches tall, and weighing a whopping 68.3 pounds, it will need, without question, its own sturdy perch to reside on. Interestingly, while as an inkjet it uses less power and requires a smaller print engine than your typical equivalent laser, this laser-alternative is as big and heavy as several laser-class printers we’ve reviewed recently, including Dell’s 70-pound Color Cloud Multifunction Printer H825cdw we looked at a week or so ago.
Why is it so big and heavy? First, it’s a solid-feeling machine with a well-reinforced metal frame, and that’s not light. Second, when it’s spitting out pages at 34 pages per minute (or ppm; that’s this model’s rated print speed in Draft mode), it needs to be sturdy; you don’t want a big ol’ machine like this to rock or vibrate. Meanwhile, everything about the WF-6590 says it’s meant for high-volume churning, down to its auto-duplexing 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). The ADF is built for scanning and copying two-sided, multipage originals, without your having to turn them over manually…
As we noted earlier, when it comes to productivity and convenience features, the WorkForce Pro WF-6590 really is loaded. While looking over its feature list, we found few, if any, of the options we expected on a workhorse like this one missing. The control panel, for instance, is anchored by a 4.3-inch touch screen, which you can use to configure the printer itself, set up and make copies, or scan to and print from network drives, cloud sites, and USB thumb drives. You can do plenty straight from the display panel, without a PC.
The USB port for loading external flash drives is located on the right edge of the chassis, just to the upper right of the output slot…
As for mobile-connectivity options, the WF-6590 supports Wi-Fi Direct for connecting compatible devices without either device being connected to a network or router, and Near-Field Communication (NFC) for touch-to-print capabilities.
In this case, the NFC hotspot is located on the left side of the chassis, to the far left of the control panel, as you can see in the image above.
Source: computershopper.com
Find more at: Tech Cuber
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