Epson A3 inkjet printer

My HP 7100 A3 inket printer finally got so bad with ink blotches all over the place, paper jams etc. so I decided to buy a new one.

I did think about an A3 color laser printer but cost was roughly 5 times that of an inkjet printer. I just do not print enough to justify the extra cost.

I bought an Epson 7310W for around £170 and a long life XXL black in cartridge will last around 2200 A4 pages (1100 A3 pages) if only filling page about 5%.

I hardly use colour as most of my prints are engineering drawings mostly in black anyway. I usually print in greyscale using black ink only.

I know I got a lot of pages on my HP A3 printer with the black cartridge (similar capaxity to Epson) and only needed one black cartridge roughly a year.

So I decided to go for an Epson as it had 2 Feed Trays (so I can have A4 and A3 at same time, and ink was also cheaper than HP.

What really impressed me was its setup.

1) install printer (trays, paper ink etc).

2) connect it to wifi (all I had to do was select SSID and enter password on its easy to use control panel.

3) Download driver to pc - dead simple without bs addons that you never use.

That was it!

None of the faffing around with HP printers where you need to connect to pc via usb first, then setup wifi blah blah blah.

It used to take me best part of an hour to connect he HP printer.

The Epson was as it should be - virtually plug and play.

One neat Epson feature is the output tray automatically moves out to the size of the paper.

How many times have I printed in A3 forgetting to extend the outlet tray - paper everywhere LOL.

Time will tell how reliable the printer is but in the end it is guaranteed for 12 months, and fingers crossed I should get at least 3 years service. Beyound that is icing on the cake.

I've just installed an HP Officejet and it was the same experience. Load paper and ink, enter SSID and password, install HP app (which I find useful) and print. Maybe they've improved things, my last printer was more of a pain needing the USB to set up but that was quite a few years back.

Graulges said:

I've just installed an HP Officejet and it was the same experience. Load paper and ink, enter SSID and password, install HP app (which I find useful) and print. Maybe they've improved things, my last printer was more of a pain needing the USB to set up but that was quite a few years back.

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Yeah possibly but I also have been given an A4 HP printer which I really only use for photos and it was only a couple of years old and it needed the usb to join.

My A4 Brother monochrome laser printer also connected without a lot of effort.

As you say things have probably improved.

Nonetheless it was a pleasant surprise for the Epson to be so easy to setup.

Only minor issue I am trying to sort out is it seems Epson printer only seems to connect to 2.4 GHZ band despite manuals saying it is 5GHZ compatible.

Still I doubt printer will operate any faster on 5GHZ band. I still need the 2.4 GHZ band for my older chromecast anyway, or else I would turn off the 2.4GHZ band altogether.