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DataMaster awards 5 stars to the Epson A4 WorkForce Enterprise AM-C400 and AM-C550

31 March 2025

After extensive testing and evaluation, DataMaster is delighted to give the Epson A4 WorkForce Enterprise AM-C400 and AM-C550 range of A4 colour MFPs the full five stars!

It is great to see a printer manufacturer deliver something really new to the market. These are the first A4 machines to have the new C-shape paper path. This means they are compact, and can reliably offer full-speed double-sided printing. Only Epson WorkForce Enterprise inkjets can offer this high productivity, and indeed many of these machines’ toner competitors run at half-speed in duplex mode.

The environmental arguments for these machines are clear: lower electrical consumption, and fewer consumables to monitor and swap out.

Our broader tests show that these machines are not just good inkjets, they can compete in feature testing with any high-end office A4 colour MFP. These are departmental or workgroup multifunction machines with the productivity, quality, features, functions and ease of use which the office market demands.

We were very impressed. They thoroughly merit the full five star evaluation from this independent European lab.


Their print quality is excellent, and many of the the best results we obtained were on ordinary paper. We give the Epson WorkForce Enterprise AM-C A4 print motor an overall grade for print quality of 95/100.

What really makes these machines stand out from the competition is the scanner's features, quality and ease of use. Scanning from the interface is really easy, and image quality is extremely good. Overall productivity (processing times) is exceptionally good; the best we have seen on an A4 device. The AM-C ranges from Epson can process complex jobs in a few seconds, where competing machines (even departmental SRA3 machines) take several minutes. The OCR scored 5/5 for accuracy. There is a very good balance of image quality and file sizes.

All Epson business MFPs can benefit from the Epson scanner management app Document Capture Pro, which delivers all the features of a professional scanner right to the interface of the MFP. No other MFP manufacturer provides such a rich set of scan features. Coupled with Document Capture Pro, an Epson MFP has most of the scan features of a professional mailroom scanner.

These are great departmental or large workgroup multifunction printers. In our “busy office” tests, the results were excellent. If you send 15 print jobs at once to the machine, it processes them all while printing, giving 92-94% productivity. This ability to RIP the next job while printing is also known as intelligent processing. In addition, if the machine is busy printing, another user can still walk up and scan a document to a folder without productivity loss for either job. Many competing machines cannot keep up with competing demands.

There are at least three exemplary environmental credentials which the whole Epson WorkForce Enterprise ranges share:

1. Their inkjet print engines do not use heat; they use just 84 watts when they are printing. Toner machines use much, much more. For example, the Ricoh IM C400 uses 684 watts!
   
   Overall these machines consume about a third as much electricity as their toner competitors.
    
2. They have fewer consumables than toner machines. The ink cartridges last a long time. The Epson AM-C A4 machines’ colour cartridge can print 28,000 pages (ISO 24711). Toner cartridges often run out much more quickly. The average capacity of colour toner cartridges for A4 machines launched since 2018 is less than 4,000. Toner machines also have fuser units, drums and other components which need changing. Epson WorkForce Enterprise machines only have inks and the waste ink box. Epson consumables are neither messy nor fragile, and they come in very simple packaging. Printer consumables have a hefty carbon footprint, considering manufacture, freight and delivery. It is important that they should have high capacities, and the fewer consumables, the better.
   
   Over five years, with a monthly volume of 5,000 prints, an Epson WorkForce AM-C400 or 550 will only need to have consumables changed 11 times. Compare this with the 53 ppm Ricoh IM C530F’s requirement of 34 consumables changes in the same period with the same print volumes.
    
3. Last but by no means least, the Epson innovations allowing all their WorkForce Enterprise machines to print onto both sides of the sheet as fast as onto a single side (the first office inkjets to be able to do so) will encourage all users to adopt paper-saving defaults. These machines’ prints dry almost instantly. Epson Workforce Enterprise machines all have large duplex units and the intelligent paper path, and they all deliver perfect productivity in duplex mode.
   
   97% of the carbon footprint of printing is in the paper. It is really important to encourage users to always print in duplex mode. Epson have succeeded in bringing inkjets to market that can fully live up to user expectations.

Epson would argue that a fourth point is that their heat-free inkjet technology means zero emissions. This is certainly true. However, toner machines’ emissions have never been shown to cause ill health among users.


All our test results are available to subscribers to the DataMaster Online sales enablement service.  You can test DMO here.


You can download DataMaster’s 5-star certificates and rosettes below.

See the product pages and other documents  

Epson AM-C400	Certificate	Rosette
Epson AM-C550	Certificate	Rosette