Epson WorkForce 840 All-in-One Printer Review

The Hardware

When all of the trays of this printer are closed, as shown in Figure 6, it is actually a fairly compact unit, considering all its functionality and paper-holding capabilities.

Figure 6: The printer with all trays closed

The automatic document feeder tray opens easily. This tray can hold up to 30 sheets of one- or two-sided originals for copying, scanning, or faxing.

The WorkForce 840 has a 7.8-inch control panel. When the latch on the back side of this control panel is pressed, it can be tilted up and adjusted to a suitable position. Figure 7 shows the printer with the document feeder and control panel extended.

Figure 7: The printer with document feeder and control panel extended

If you look closely at Figure 7, you can see that the screen has three distinct areas. The darker square in the center is the 3.5-inch color LCD touchscreen. The area on either side of the touchscreen is a type of control panel whose controls appear contextually (only when needed). To the left of the screen and the control panel area is an on/off button and a Wi-Fi indicator light.

This printer has an auto-duplexer, which is great for saving on paper costs by automatically printing on both sides of the paper. The duplex unit can be seen in Figure 8 on the back of the unit. While some duplex units protrude by as much as three or four inches, this duplexer protrudes only slightly.

On the right side of the back you can also see the plug for the power cable and the two telephone jacks.

Figure 8: The back of the WorkForce 840

The USB and Ethernet ports can be seen on the side of the unit, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9: The side of the WorkForce 840

On the left front of the WorkForce 840 are slots for media cards as shown in Figure 10. This printer accepts a large variety of memory cards including Memory Stick PRO, SDHC Memory Card, MultiMediaCard, CompactFlash, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCardplus, SD Memory Card, IBM Microdrive, USB flash drive, and xD-Picture Card. (See the Mais Specifications page for the complete list.) Any of these can be used for saving scans and/or copies or for printing directly from memory cards and flash drives. Under the card slots is a USB/PictBridge
port.

Figure 10: The media card slots