Epson WorkForce Pro WF-3820 Printer Review

The Epson WF-3820 feels well-built. It has a sturdy, durable-feeling plastic body, with no obvious gaps in the construction. The scan lid stays fully open on its own and feels solid as well. The lid's hinges can extend to accommodate thicker items like textbooks and magazines, but the range is limited, so you might still have trouble closing the lid if the item is too thick. You can access the sheet rollers by removing a cover at the back and the ink cartridges by lifting the flatbed scanner. The right rear corner houses a removable maintenance box that stores ink flushed during the print head cleaning; you need to replace it once it's full.

Unfortunately, there's only one input tray, and you can't have both regular paper and photo paper loaded at once. If you want to use a different type of paper, you need to manually unload and reload the tray with the right type of paper each time. Also, the printer needs to be on to replace the ink cartridges.

This printer requires a fair amount of maintenance. Like most inkjet printers, the printheads can clog if you don't print regularly. There are maintenance functions built-in to help resolve any clogging or print quality issues, like printhead cleaning, printhead nozzle check, power cleaning, printhead alignment, and paper guide cleaning. Depending on how much you print, you may need to replace the ink cartridges often, especially the black ink cartridge. Replacing the cartridges is easy; you just need to ensure the printer is on and select the Ink Cartridge Replacement function to access the cartridge bay. For paper jams, you can access the sheet rollers through the back panel. The input tray holds 250 sheets of paper, which is a good amount, so you likely won't need to refill it often unless you print a lot.

You can see the user manual here

The display is good. It's easy to see whether you're sitting or standing, and you can tilt the display panel to improve visibility. The user interface is easy to navigate, and if you're confused about how to do something, how-to diagrams are available by pressing the Help button.

The cartridge system is only okay. The black page yield is pretty low, but the color page yield is good. There are three different color cartridges, so you can change the empty ones without needing to replace them all at once. You need to replace the black ink cartridge as soon as it runs out because the printer won't print with color cartridges only. There are high-capacity cartridges (T822XL) that'll last longer, although we didn't test these.

If you're looking for a similarly priced color inkjet printer with superior page yields, check out the Brother MFC-J4335DW.

The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-3820 has decent scanner features. Its automatic document feeder (ADF) can process sheets fairly quickly, but it doesn't support duplex scanning, so you'll have to flip the pages manually when scanning double-sided documents. Its OCR (optical character recognition) feature lets you scan and save documents as PDFs for quick keyword searches, but it's software-based, which means you need to install the Epson ScanSmart app to use it. The OCR works well; it only makes mistakes when there are special characters.

The scan quality is mediocre. The scanner boosts the contrast slightly, making text look sharper, but it doesn't capture finer details, which isn't ideal for digitizing photos and graphics.

• User manual
• Installation CD
• Power cable
• Epson T822 starter cartridges:
• 1x Black
• 1x Cyan
• 1x Magenta
• 1x Yellow

The print quality for black-and-white documents is great. Most text looks clear, although smaller text on a colored background is very blurry and hard to read. Otherwise, all the fine elements come through. The only other complaint is that the colored areas look quite grainy.

The print quality for color documents is great. Text looks sharp, and all the fine elements are present. However, smaller text on a colored background is a bit harder to read, and the colors look a tad muted.

The cost-per-print is great. Although the ink cartridges don't last very long, they're relatively cheap, so your running costs will remain low over time.

The overall printing speed is very good. Although the first page takes some time to come out, subsequent pages get faster after that, especially for black-only documents. The photo printing speed is decent and within the typical range for inkjet printers. If you'd like a printer with a higher input tray capacity, check out the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7840.

In addition to the preset sizes, you can also set a custom size for paper between 3.5 inches to 47.2 inches in length. This also lets you print on A5-sized paper if you set the measurements manually. Unfortunately, the input tray can only hold one format of paper at a time, which is bothersome if you often switch between regular paper and photo paper.

The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-3820 has an okay color gamut. It reproduces bright, saturated tones well but struggles with lighter shades of blue and darker shades of green and yellow. Unfortunately, color transitions aren't smooth at all, as there's a lot of grain and some banding as well.

The print quality is noticeably worse near the left and right edges. This is due to borderless printing and is present on all 4 x 6 photos. The printer warns you about the loss in print quality the first time you use borderless printing.

The color accuracy is passable. Most colors look different from the original, especially blues and yellow. Printed photos still look relatively natural, albeit with a very warm tone.

The Epson WF-3820 is outstanding at reproducing small details. Fine elements look clear; it's mainly distant objects that get blurry due to the use of halftones (dot effect).

This printer supports borderless printing; however, printing borderless may cause a slight decrease in print quality.

The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-3820 can print directly off a USB flash drive. The USB port is on the front left side of the printer and has a protective cover over it.

The Epson Smart Panel app is very feature-rich. It lets you print, scan, and copy directly from your mobile device. It also lets you check ink levels, perform maintenance tasks like firmware updates, nozzle checks, printhead cleaning, and order new cartridges right from the app. You can print most file types on both Android and iOS, but some don't work on iOS. For example, when printing a Microsoft Office document from the iOS version of the app, the document's format isn't converted properly, meaning the result is a mobile version of the print. Also, TXT files aren't supported by the iOS version of the app. That said, you can still print both file types using Apple AirPrint.

You need to install drivers on Windows devices to use the printer, but not on Chrome OS or macOS devices. You can find the drivers here.