Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4630 Photo Print Quality and Scan Quality

In my comparison shopping and obsessive reading of online reviews for the new Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4630 printer (via Amazon) that I recently purchased, I had a hard time finding information about the WorkForcePro WF-4630 Photo Print Quality.  I had an Epson printer in the past that I really liked that printed amazing pictures, so I figured I would give this model a shot and see how it performed.  I also thought that since I couldn’t find the info on photo print quality that I was looking for, that I would do this quick post to share my results so far.

Quickly though before I go into my analysis of the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4630 photo print quality, I wanted to touch on the ink cartridged.  This kind of took me by surprise as the ink cartridges are huge compared to any other ink jet cartridges I’ve used in the past.  In the photo above, you can see the small printer cartridge from my old Canon printer which is a fraction of the size of these new ones that come with the WorkForce Pro WF-4530.  I’m hopeful that although the packaging says you should replace them after 6 months that this is just not totally true because cartridges this size should last me quite a bit longer than 6 months.

Here is what I found when printing a photo from the same digital camera that I use for all the photography on the site.  For those of you that are curious, thats the Old Queen’s building on the Rutgers University campus here in NJ.  It’s the oldest building on the campus, originally built between 1808 and 1825.

The next three pictures stitched together are (top down) a cropped version of the original photo, a photograph of the actual print output, and finally a scanned view of that printed out photo.  This may not be the most ideal way to show the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4630 photo print quality but its the best way I could think of to accomplish a comparison online.  I’ll leave it to you to make your own comparison visually by clicking on the above photo to see it a little bigger, however my personal opinion is that the Epson WorkForcePro WF-4630 photo print quality is adequate or passable, but not the top notch quality you would expect from a dedicated photo printer.  On the other hand, the few tests of text only documents that I’ve printed have turned out crisp and they printed very fast.

My initial reactions so far are that this printer will be great for the initial purpose of printing text, will be as good for simple graphics, and passable for actual photos.  I will do a more detailed review of the printer once I’ve had time to test it out further, but for now its definitely feeling like a good purchase.  Prices for the Epson WorkForcePro WF-4630 seemed to be all over the place  while I was shopping for printers, I’d recommend checking it out at Amazon though as thats where I found the best price.