Obligatory disclaimer: I have been given an Epson WorkForce 600 all-in-one device to review but also to keep. If you know me at all, you will know that this in no way compromises the following review.

One thing I know about myself, and I will be the first to admit it: I cannot follow instructions. I even struggle to follow recipes when cookie and inevitably mess the entire dish up because I misread something. So I tend to use recipes as vague guidelines to creating my own dishes. But technical instructions for tech devices? My eyes just glaze over, and I just take a deep breath and try to figure out each device by intuition.

That said, when the Epson WorkForce 600 arrived, I knew that it would never be as simple as plugging it into the wall and into my MacBook.

So truth be told, I turned to my husband to help me set things up even though I’m considered to be far more “techy” than he. My husband compensates for his Luddite tendencies by reading instructions cover to cover, often highlighting important passages. He follows instructions step-by-step, page-by-page. His meticulousness with direction following is a marvel to behold. While he set up my new printer, I sat back and sipped my coffee, careful not to be a backseat driver during the process. My major contribution was handing him some printer paper. I participated.

My husband has been using an Epson printer for about three years - an Epson Stylus Photo R300 - and has been pleased with it other than the fact that it doesn’t print photos correctly anymore, printing them too dark, and he hasn’t figured out how to fix that. I’ve been an HP gal since I gave up my dot matrix many moons ago.

The WorkForce 600 is leaps and bounds over any printer I’ve ever had. It is a 5 in 1 with WiFi. It prints, copies, scans, prints photos and faxes. It can print draft pages up to 38 pages per minute (B&W). I haven’t had a fax machine in a decade but have actually found the need for it every few months so it will be nice to have one again.

Installation

Once my husband went through the initial setup which included setting date and time and inserting the ink cartridges, he handed me the CD to install the printer driver and software. The process of installation was easy, however, then we hit a bump in the road. The printer required a USB cable but did not come with one. Luckily, my Boy Scout of a husband had an extra one that came with external harddrive, so I was able to complete the set up process and print a test page.

Installation on the PC seemed similar to installing on a Mac.

Printing

The test print page was certainly speed, however, the true test of a printer these days is how well it handles higher resolution photographs.

My husband tried the photo printing first. We both agreed that it printed images very quickly, and the quality was great. “It prints good color,” were my husband’s exact words, and as he is a very talented photographer and fine artist, I take his word for it. I tried printing an image, and again, it was speedy and looked really nice, even on cheap printer paper.

The printer did make a loud cranking sound as it geared up to print that startled us both and made us think that something was wrong with it, but it appears that is just what it does.

WiFi

The real attraction of this device for me is it’s WiFi capabilities. Unfortunately, my WiFi hub is set up under the living room sofa and the printer is set up in our home office downstairs, therefore, our current configuration isn’t conducive to setting the printer up as a WiFi device. Since we are preparing for a move in December, we’ll make sure that everything I need for full productivity is set up properly.

All-In-All

My assessment of the Epson WorkForce 600? So far so good. I’ll report back once I have it set up in the new home office in a month, especially once I’ve tried out all the other features.

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