Epson WorkForce WF-7840

Is the Epson WorkForce WF-7840 worth buying?

The Epson WorkForce WF-7840 is worth the £231.90 for an office that prints A3 and also has to scan, copy or fax A3 originals, because print, scan, copy and fax all handle A3+ on the same machine. Papers that arrive at 457 mm wide go straight onto the flatbed and come back out as a digital file, which most A3 inkjets in this price band cannot do at all. With 209 owners rating it 4.1, it is also one of the better-evidenced buys in the category.

Buy it if A3 paper is something you receive as well as produce. Skip it if A3 only ever leaves your desk as a file you created on screen: you would be paying for a scanner, a fax module and a 50-sheet automatic document feeder that never do any work. A print-only A3+ machine does the same job on paper for a good deal less money.

How fast is the Epson WorkForce WF-7840 in practice?

The number that defines the Epson WorkForce WF-7840 is 32 ppm in mono, and £231.90 divided by 32 comes to £7.25 for every page per minute of speed. Put another way, a 120-page A3 report spends just under four minutes in the printer. That is roughly twice the throughput of the slower A3 all-in-ones in this price bracket, which matters when a print run is blocking the desk rather than sitting in a queue.

Colour is a different story at 12 ppm, roughly a third of the mono rate, so a 60-page colour booklet holds the machine for about five minutes. Those figures are document speeds on plain paper: a full-coverage A3 sheet with heavy ink on it takes longer than the arithmetic suggests, and photo settings are slower again. The 600 x 600 resolution points the same way, at documents and labels rather than gallery prints.

What comes with the Epson WorkForce WF-7840 and what is it like to live with?

At 20.6 kg the Epson WorkForce WF-7840 is a two-person lift onto a desk, and once it is there it wants to stay: budget the footprint of a small microwave and a surface that does not flex. It takes A3 sheets up to 457 mm, prints on labels, and feeds from twin trays plus the 50-sheet automatic document feeder for multipage scanning. Automatic duplex is built in, so double-sided A3 comes out without turning a single sheet by hand.

On the connection side you get one Ethernet port, one USB port, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct, with a touchscreen for the settings you change at the machine and Android phones pairing directly for a quick print. The 50-sheet output capacity is the detail to plan around: a 200-page job needs the tray emptied four times, and ink is not included beyond the starter cartridges. Buy A3 paper and a set of Epson CMYK cartridges at the same time so the first big run is not held up.

Where does the Epson WorkForce WF-7840 fall short?

The 20.6 kg weight is the first thing you notice, and it makes the machine a permanent resident rather than something you shuffle between rooms or take to a client. Colour output at 12 ppm is the second: mixed documents with logos, charts or images take about three times as long as plain text, so a colour-heavy week feels much slower than the 32 ppm headline.

Ink runs on Epson CMYK cartridges rather than refillable tanks, so the cost per page stays higher over the life of the printer than on the EcoTank models in the same range, even though the purchase price is lower. The 50-sheet feeder is also modest for a machine this capable: a 150-page contract or survey has to be scanned in three passes. And with a limited warranty, extended cover is worth pricing before the first year is out.

How does the Epson WorkForce WF-7840 compare with the Brother MFC-J5340DW and the Epson WF-7310DTW?

The Brother MFC-J5340DW costs £185.90, which is £46.00 less, prints A3 at 28 ppm and keeps scanning, copying and faxing at A4 only. On speed the gap is small, 32 ppm against 28 ppm, and the value figures are £7.25 against £6.64 per page per minute. The WF-7840 earns its £46 when A3 originals have to be digitised or copied at full size; the Brother is the smarter buy for an office that prints A3 and scans ordinary A4 paperwork.

The Epson WF-7310DTW is the cheaper way into A3+ printing at £154.19, £77.71 less, and it matches this machine at 32 ppm mono. What it drops is everything around the printing: no scanner, no copier, no fax and no feeder, which is why its value figure drops to £4.82 per page per minute. Choose the WF-7310DTW if A3 only ever goes out, and the WF-7840 if it also has to come back in.

Against the Canon PIXMA TS9550a at £176.99, the WF-7840 costs £54.91 more and prints at more than double the speed, 32 ppm against 15 ppm. Both handle A3 scanning, so the Canon is the compact, slower option at a lower price, and the WF-7840 is the one that clears a long run before a meeting.