The WorkForce Pro WF-6590 ($549.99) is Epson's highest-end color multifunction printer (MFP) for letter- and legal-size printing. Although an inkjet, it is built to go toe-to-toe with color lasers. Among the WF-6590's ( at Amazon) assets are blazing speed, low running costs, a wide range of connectivity choices (including Wi-Fi Direct and NFC), and enough paper capacity for heavy-duty printing. Its output quality is solid across the board. Like its tabloid-size counterpart, the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-8590 ($1,499.99 at Epson) , it's an impressive enough machine to take home our Editors' Choice.

Design and Features
As a relatively heavy-duty MFP, the WF-6590 is a large machine. It measures 20.2 by 20.3 by 20.6 inches (HWD) when closed for storage, and up to 21.3 by 20.3 by 29.8.1 inches when printing. It should be easy enough to find room for in a small office, though not on your desk. You may want to enlist two people to help move it into place, as it weighs 68 pounds.

Atop the printer is a legal-size flatbed, plus an automatic document feeder (ADF) that can hold up to 50 sheets. The ADF supports single-pass scanning of two-sided documents. There is also an auto-duplexer for two-sided printing. The panel located below the front of the flatbed tilts slightly upward for easy reading. It includes a 4.3-inch color touch screen, with which you can easily access menus to control MFP functions, an alphanumeric keypad, and assorted function buttons. Below the front panel is a USB thumb from which you can print files, as well as scan documents to it.

With a 75,000-page maximum monthly duty cycle and a recommended monthly duty cycle of 5,000 pages, the WF-6590 is built to print in volume. It has a 580-sheet standard paper capacity, split between a 500-sheet main tray and an 80-sheet multipurpose feeder. Up to two additional 500-sheet trays ($199.99 each) can be added, for a maximum capacity of 1,580 sheets. This is better paper handling than the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-5690($329.99 at Amazon), our Editors' Choice color MFP, which has a standard paper capacity of 330 sheets and a maximum capacity of 580 sheets.

Setup and Connectivity
The WF-6590 does not include a setup disc. Instead, there is a link in the quick-start guide to an Epson support page where you can download the software. Epson is one of several manufacturers now offering software downloads rather than including a disc. The advantage to this it insures that the software is up-to-date, and the downside is that it can take a while to download the software, depending on your Internet connection.

There's a good range of connection choices. The MFP can connect to a computer via USB, or to a local-area network via Ethernet or 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi. In addition, it offers both Wi-Fi Direct and NFC, which let you make a direct peer-to-peer connection to a compatible computer or mobile device. The WF-6590 supports printing from the Epson iPrint app (for iOS or Android), Google Cloud Print, Epson Email Print, and Epson Remote Print. The latter two allow users to automatically print to this MFP by sending it documents via email. Epson gives you the option of having an email address assigned to the printer during the setup process, which you can change to an address more to your liking.

In addition to an Epson (host-based) printer driver, the WF-6590 includes PCL and PostScript drivers. A PostScript driver is a must for businesses that use PostScript printing.

Printing Speed
I tested the printer over an Ethernet connection, with its drivers installed on a computer running Windows Vista. I timed the WF-6590 on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at a sizzling 12.7 pages per minute (ppm). This is much faster than the Lexmark X548dte , another top pick, which we clocked at 7ppm. The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-5690 tested at 10.3ppm, and the HP Officejet Pro X576dw ( at Amazon) at 9.5ppm. The Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce Pro WF-8590 was also very fast, at 12.5ppm.

The HP X576dw, our Editors' Choice color MFP for light- to medium-duty printing for an SMB, is built for lower print volumes than the Epson WF-6590, with a 4,200-page recommended monthly duty cycle and a 1,050-sheet maximum paper capacity. Although the X576dw is a very capable MFP, it lacks a few of the WF-6590's flourishes, such as single-pass, two-sided scanning (the X576DW can scan two-sided documents, but by scanning one sheet, flipping it over, and then scanning the other side), and NFC capability.

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Output Quality and Running Costs
Output quality in our tests was average across the board for an inkjet. Text quality should be fine for business use, except when very small fonts are used. Graphics are good enough for any business use up to and including PowerPoint handouts. Several test backgrounds had a slightly mottled look, and some very, thin colored lines were barely visible. Photo quality is about what you would expect from drugstore prints. A monochrome photo showed a modest tint.

Based on Epson's prices and yields, the WF-6590's cost per monochrome page is 1.6 cents and cost per color page is 6.7 cents, the same as the Epson WF-8590. Both figures are very low for inkjets in general—and the color cost is lower than most color lasers—and are in line with the running costs for other laser-class inkjets. The Epson WF-5690's costs, for instance, are 1.6 cents per monochrome page and 7.2 cents per color page, and the HP X576dw's at 1.3 cents per monochrome page and 6.8 cents per color page.

Conclusion
As Epson's top-of-the-line color MFP for letter- or legal-size printing, the WorkForce Pro WF-6590 is a formidable machine. It offers exceptional speed, a rich feature set, low running costs, and solid output quality. It's faster and offers better features than the Epson WF-5690 and the HP X576dw, both top picks for color MFPs for light-duty printing. It even beats similarly equipped color lasers, including the now-discontinued Lexmark X548dte, which it replaces as our Editors' Choice medium- to heavy-duty small-office or workgroup color MFP. Any way you measure it, the WF-6590 means business.

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