Epson Stylus Office BX925FWD review

Epson has a range of office-oriented inkjet all-in-ones, intelligently named Stylus Office and the Stylus Office BX925FWD is the top of the range. In the same sort of price bracket as HP’s OfficeJet 8500A Plus and Lexmark’s Platinum Pro 905, it aims to handle text printing quickly, but with the versatility to be able to print good quality colour pages, including photos.



A tall, fairly square-cut machine all decked out in black, it includes a 30-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), with a cunning two-part cover which completes the printer’s smooth lines when closed. The scanner has extending hinges, so you can scan book pages as well as single sheets, and the ADF is duplex, so the printer can perform double-sided copies.

The widescreen control panel folds out to any of seven positions and has just one physical button, to power the printer on and off. Everything else is handled by a touch panel, which has an 89mm touchscreen in the centre and a series of single-function touch buttons either side. The buttons need firm pressure to operate and are certainly nothing like an iPhone screen, but are still easy enough to use.

Directly below the control panel is a three-stage telescopic output tray with a flip-up paper stop at the front. Below that are two 250-sheet paper trays, so you can load both plain paper and letterheads, photo paper or other media, simultaneously. The printer can't feed special papers from the lower tray.

There are two memory card slots to the left of the control panel, including one for less and less common CompactFlash, and there's a PictBridge socket below these.



Ethernet and USB sockets are positioned in the left-hand side panel of the printer, but it also has wireless connectivity and WPS setup which, with the right router, only takes a couple of button presses.

Epson uses four ink cartridges, including a double-width, high-capacity black, and these clip into the piezoelectric head and undergo a short charging cycle before the printer is ready to use.

The software bundle includes a copy of Presto! PageManager 9 for document management and OCR and there are various other Epson utilities, including Easy Photo Print. Drivers for both Windows and OS X are provided. Linux support comes from Avasys, a third-party.