Epson WorkForce 840 All-in-One Printer Review

Setup

Setting up the WorkForce 840 was an easy job. The four-fold Start Here guide walks you through the eight steps to getting your printer going. The first steps include unpacking, turning on, and selecting settings. To install the print cartridges, raise the scanner cover and open the door on the cartridge compartment, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: The cartridge compartment

The 840 has two paper trays that can be pulled out from the front of the printer, as shown in Figure 5. Tray one can hold letter, A4, legal-size, 4×6-inch (10 x 15 cm), 5×7-inch (13 x 18 cm), or 8×10-inch (20 x 25 cm) paper (plain or photo). Tray two can be used only for letter, A4, or legal-size plain paper. One nice feature is that each tray can hold 250 sheets which means that between the two trays, you can load an entire ream of paper. Instead of paper, the upper tray can also hold 10 envelopes.

Figure 5: The paper trays

After you load the paper, you connect the included phone cord and install the software. The software installation walks you through the set up for the type of connection that you are using. There are three ways to connect the WorkForce 840. It supports USB 2.0, Wireless Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n), and Wired Ethernet (10/100 Mbps). Both the USB and Ethernet connections require a cable, which is not included. A USB cable is also needed for setting up a wireless connection, but following the software wizard makes the setup easy. The last step was the fax setup which was also straightforward.

The software disk also includes the Epson Easy Photo Print, Epson Scan, Epson CreativeZone, and ABBYY FineReader software. These programs provide basic printing, scanning, and OCR character recognition.