Epson’s B-510DN color inkjet printer could be the first crossover success, besting its own cohort (as well as many lower-end color lasers) in speed and cost per page. All this talent comes at a high initial price, but if you need speed, volume, and economy, plus good photo printing, this printer is well worth considering.

The B-510DN’s design is efficient rather than aesthetic. The front ink-cartridge bay makes replacing consumables a snap, but it protrudes awkwardly from the unit’s face. The control panel is simple, with a two-line monochrome LCD and a few buttons whose purposes are clear even without word labels. The front input tray holds 500 letter/legal sheets and has a 170-sheet output tray on top. A rear input takes envelopes and the like (or another 150 sheets of paper). The B-510DN can connect via USB or ethernet. Automatic duplexing is standard. On the Mac platform, driver glitch means that Mac OS X 10.6 users must select the paper size and type manually in their application—just for the first time duplexing is used. Epson says a fix is due by September.

Pages virtually flew out of the B-510DN. Via a Mac, plain text averaged 13.82 ppm, while a four-page PDF of mixed text and graphics managed 2 ppm. A high-resolution color photo (at near-full-page size) printed at a rate of 1.1 ppm.Via a PC connection, plain-text pages averaged 14.7 ppm, and color photos (4-by-6 inches on letter-size media), 3.4 ppm.

Print quality was mostly very good. Photos on Epson’s own matte paper boasted accurate colors and a slightly dotty, but even, texture. (The same images on plain paper looked washed out and grainy, though.) Text printed on plain paper was nicely dark but a little fuzzy--one of the few areas where similarly priced lasers and even the HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 Wireless fared a little better.

The B-510DN’s consumables are extremely cheap. Its standard-sized supplies include the T616100, a $40, 3000-page black (1.3 cents per page) and $50, 3500-page cyan (T616200), magenta (T616300), and yellow (T616400) cartridges (1.4 cents per color, per page). A full-color page would cost just 5.6 cents. The high-yield colors (with T617 designations) each cost $60 and last 7000 pages, or 0.9 cents per color, per page. Epson offers two larger black tanks: the T617100, a $50, 4000-page cartridge, and the T618100, a $70, 8000-page cartridge. The former marginally reduces cost per page to 1.2 cents (hardly worth the bother compared with the T616100), while the latter cuts per-page expense to a mere 0.87 cents. A maintenance tray to collect leftover ink costs $17.50 and lasts 35,000 pages.

Macworld’s buying advice

The Epson B-510DN removes nearly all question of whether an inkjet printer can succeed in business. It offers competitive speeds and ink costs—enough to make some lower-end color lasers nervous.