Epson Stylus Office BX635FWD review

Epson’s Stylus Office BX635FWD is an inkjet MFP aimed at small businesses and home offices. It’s a well-specified device – with support for wired and wireless networks, a built-in fax modem and a 30-page document feeder for unattended multi-page copies and faxes – but at a price that’s within reach of even the most cash-strapped start up.

Made from smart black plastics, the BX635FWD doesn’t particularly look like an office-orientated MFP. It’s compact and, despite the proliferation of buttons on its control panel, it’s easy to operate. Epson’s software installer is simple, but it fails to stress that the Epson Networking Utilities must be installed if you plan to connect the printer over the network.

Epson has recently revamped its print driver, and the result has a cleaner interface that’s as easy to get to grips with as the previous version. We’re also big fans of the company’s TWAIN scan interface, which can be run in different modes suited to different users. Professional mode gives users full and exacting control over scan settings, but the interface remains uncluttered and easy to use. Subtleties such as remembering previewed images between sessions help to increase productivity, too.

Our initial print tests suffered from colour banding, necessitating a single round of head cleaning – a simple routine that can be accessed either from the printer’s setup menu or from the driver’s maintenance page. Although the head cleaning cured the banding, we noticed that text printed at quality settings up to and including Normal suffered from some subtle horizontal tearing. Normally this might suggest that the print heads need alignment – a manual process on most Epson printers – but the problem was no better after a couple of alignment attempts. The problem wasn’t visible when printing at either of the top two quality settings, but the printer managed only 1.7ppm on the Fine setting.

Subtle horizontal tearing was seen at some quality levels

This glitch aside, we were impressed by this MFP’s print quality on plain paper. Colours in the magazine pages and business graphics of our mixed-colour test were robust without being gaudy, and fills and gradients were solid and smooth. Despite a wide range of memory card slots, this isn’t a photo-orientated printer. While the results from the pigment-based inks were characteristically lacklustre, they’re good enough for occasional use.

Images captured by the scanner weren’t perfectly sharp at very high resolutions, but they were more than good enough for regular office work. Exposure was typically well judged, with accurate colours and good retention of detail from the lightest and darkest regions of the original image. Scans were rapid at low and medium resolutions, but performance was a little slow at 1,200dpi. We suspected the bandwidth of our wireless network was a limiting factor, but this test was only a few seconds faster when repeated over a USB connection.

With above average performance, a good set of features, a modest asking price and reasonable running costs, this is a competent MFP for the home office. It’s not ideal if you need to print perfect text quickly, though.