Product Reviews

Several manufacturers claim that business inkjets will soon rival their laser counterparts for cost, speed and quality. Epson's B-500DN is one of the latest. It's designed for heavy use, with a maximum monthly duty cycle of 20,000 pages. Once connected to your network, web administration screens make it easy to manage. Unfortunately, it has no built-in support for PCL or PostScript, and no drivers for operating systems other than Windows and Citrix.

The separate cyan, magenta, yellow and black cartridges are huge, and slot into bays behind a flap at the front of the printer. When switched on for the first time the printer takes around three minutes to charge the system. The only other consumable is a replaceable maintenance box that collects excess ink.

The first challenge that business inkjets face when trying to compete with laser printers is speed. Unlike a laser printer, an inkjet's quality settings make a great deal of difference to the speed at which it prints. Draft-quality text documents printed at a quick 17.6ppm, but this is still way short of the claimed 37ppm. However, our figures include processing times, while Epson's don't. Draft prints were easily good enough to use for everyday documents - lettering was dark with only slightly flawed edges.

Correspondence-quality mono text was only slightly slower at 14.7ppm, using the Text mode. Lettering was dark, clear, and solid. We had to wait just 10 seconds for our first page to emerge.

Colour print speeds of 9.6ppm were faster than those of all but one of the printers in our last colour laser Labs (Shopper 240). The B-500DN's colour quality is excellent.

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Graphs and illustrations were solid and smoothly shaded, without any blemishes. Documents looked good on standard copier paper, but upgrading to 100gsm paper produced a visible improvement in mixed-colour prints. Lettering was sharper and the entire document looked more polished.

Duplex print options are located on the Page Layout tab of the printer properties dialog. As well as the standard options for margin adjustment, automatic and manual duplexing, there's an additional button labelled Adjust Print Density. This lets you specify the quantity of ink used to print each page. Less ink means lighter prints but faster drying times, so the ink won't smudge as the page is fed back through the rollers. Draft text was readable, but rather pale at default density settings. A 10-sided draft duplex document printed in one minute and 50 seconds, producing a fairly respectable speed of 5.5 sides per minute.

Photo printing isn't required by most businesses, but the B-500DN's photo mode is excellent. Unlike Epson's home and semi-professional photo printers, such as the Stylus Photo R360, the B-500DN lists only a limited range of paper types, but covers papers designed for leaflets and flyers. This is ideal for businesses that want to print small runs of promotional material in-house, but it's worth noting that the B-500DN isn't capable of borderless printing.

Epson claims that the printer has lower print costs than any other on the market. An extra-high-capacity black cartridge costs £39, while three high-capacity colour cartridges come to a total of £106. The T6181 black cartridge can print 8,000 pages and the colour cartridges should last for 7,000. That adds up to print costs of just 0.5p and 1.5p for black and colour prints respectively. A page of mixed-colour printing costs just 2p, far less than with any other printer we've reviewed.

With fast print speeds and incredibly low costs, the B-500DN fulfils Epson's claim that it rivals a similarly priced colour laser. Print quality was great, too, even on 80gsm photocopier paper. If it had borderless printing box and wider operating system support, we'd have given it a Business award. The B-500DN proves that inkjets have a place in the office.