Epson Workforce WF-100W review

It's only slightly bigger than a box of tissues, but Epson's WorkForce WF-100W is a remarkably capable, portable inkjet printer. It can tackle almost anything you'd throw at a desktop equivalent, but two features make it particularly suited to a life on the road: its standard Wi-Fi interface can be put into host mode, letting you print wirelessly from a laptop or mobile device while away from your usual networks, and there's a built in battery for truly mobile use.

The WF-100W doesn't come with a slip case, but it looks like it's designed to cope with bumps and scratches. There's a tough plastic lid that clips closed, protecting more vulnerable areas such as the paper input and output slots, the control panel and the ink access hatch. Open the lid and it forms a surprisingly resilient 20-page paper input, but there's no paper output tray. While that sounds like a recipe for mayhem, the printer ejects pages slowly, and on a flat surface they remain very tidy.

Epson supplies a laptop-style power adaptor, but unusually this printer can recharge from a USB connection, provided it's sleeping or turned off. You could save the space and weight of its own adaptor if you're travelling with a laptop, or if you've got access to any mains or car USB charger. The flexibility is welcome, but the flipside is that the integrated battery doesn't appear to have much capacity: we charged it fully then printed 25 mono pages from a PC and one test page from a phone, after which it had dropped to 58%.

This printer's control panel comprises a colour screen with cursor and selection keys. It works well, but we were disappointed that, after setting up a direct wireless network to test mobile devices, the printer hadn't remembered the details of the office network it was previously on. This is an irritation if you want to use it on the road and at home, but the WF-100W isn't ideal for the latter role: unlike a good desktop inkjet there's no duplex or borderless printing, and print speeds are somewhat limited.

The WF-100W reached 6.4 pages per minute (ppm) when printing black text and 2.2ppm on complex colour graphics, but it was slower on battery power: text speed fell to 3.8ppm. Print quality was great on plain paper, but photos aren't this printer's forte.

Unfortunately, the WF-100W uses ink cartridges, which last for only 250 black and 200 colour pages. There's also a replaceable waste ink collector, which Epson expects to last 'for approximately five to six sets of cartridges'. Even without factoring it in, high print costs of 13.3p per page underline that while this is an excellent printer for the road, it's not a workhorse for the home.