All-In-One (AIO) printers are one of the most demanded commodities especially for SOHOs and medium business. The amount we copy, print and scan documents today has increased so much over the past years that it’s not only become an efficient way of doing work, but also a necessity. This month, we take a look at Epson’s latest entry into the AIO category – the Stylus Office TX300F.

The TX300F weighs at 7.2kg, which is actually quite light compared to most MFPs out there. This makes it easy to relocate the printer should there be need to. Also, its dimensions are 54 x 46 x 30 (cm) only so it doesn’t take up that much space. The two main things that you’ll be interacting with most of the time would be the control panel and the cover. One of the problems encountered with scanners is the number of times people open and close the cover. If the hinges are flimsy, the cover will become loose overtime. Thankfully, the hinges are strong and sturdy, and it can even be extended a bit higher for scanning thicker books. The control panel hosts a number of useful buttons such as copy, fax-related buttons, a menu button and more. Navigation in the menu is pretty easy and the learning curve is short so you won’t be caught clueless using the TX300F.

While the design of the printer is somewhat good, speed is not on its side. On draft mode, the printer is rated at 18ppm (pages per minute) for plain text documents while it can only churn out three colored prints per minute. On normal mode, it takes even longer for the print jobs to finish; black and white printing is rated at 5ppm while it can’t even print one full colored document in a minute. Part of the reason for its slow printing speed is attributed to the long preparation when its first starts printing. To print photos at best quality, it takes a painful 4 minutes and 21 seconds to complete the job. That being said, the image quality produced by the TX300F is one of the best we’ve seen so far. The color accuracy is almost perfect while the picture come out sharp. Furthermore, it took the machine to scan a fully colored document in 35 seconds, and the scanned image actually looked better than the original document. This is where Epson’s proprietary technologies come into play. In the printer options, there is photo-optimising feature (among others) that balances color levels to improve quality. And it seems to be doing a good job at it. As for faxing, we didn’t come across any problems sending document over.

The TX300F really suffers from slow speed and in this current society, speed is everything. Yet at the same time, it produces top notch quality that rivals that of higher end printers. It would be hard not to be impressed by the TX300F’s capability though the speed factor is definitely something to worry about. It’s actually quite a good deal for its price, but bear in mind, Epson ink cartridges run out pretty fast. And in the long run, it might amount to higher costs. So keep that in mind when you want to invest in a printer for long term.

Source: http://hardwaretechreview.com/epson-stylus-office-tx300f-all-in-one-printer-review