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Tom's Guide Verdict

While this printer is pricey up front, the ET-2550's refillable ink tanks make it very economical over time and a practiced fit for people with heavy printing demands.

Pros

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Very low price per page
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Excellent photo-impress and scan quality
+
Fast at black-and-white copying
+
Fast to commencement up

Cons

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Loftier upwards-front cost
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Irksome scanning and photo printing

The Epson Expression ET-2550 EcoTank ($400) offers one of the most enticing propositions in today's ink-jet printer market: inexpensive ink. Since this printer has iv refillable ink tanks instead of replaceable ink cartridges, you buy inks by the bottle, non by the cartridge. The resulting cost per folio is a fraction of what you lot pay with competing models. But the high up-front cost makes the bargain sound a little less sweet: Models with similar features cost equally little as $100.

Design

The compartment containing the iv ink tanks sticks out from the right side of the unit, giving the ET-2550 a different wait than that of printers using cartridges. Here, you lift a encompass, revealing the four tanks, with their pop-off caps.

The front end control panel has few buttons and a modest, one.4-inch screen, which makes stand-alone functioning less than optimal, especially since it's non a impact display. When you use the control panel to initiate a browse, for instance, the screen offers no settings menu for changing the resolution. Y'all need to do that kind of adjustment on a PC.

The ET-2550 prints, scans and copies, simply has no fax. Its single, 100-canvas input tray sticks up from the back of the unit, and yous load newspaper vertically. There is no defended secondary tray for photo newspaper or other specialty media, and then y'all'll have to swap media when switching print tasks. An SD Card slot on the front console, to the left of the output tray, conveniently lets you print from your photographic camera's memory bill of fare; however, you lot tin can't scan a document to a card in the slot.

Print Speed

The ET-2550 isn't specially fast at printing everyday documents on manifestly paper. It printed our five-page text document in 42 seconds, or 7.i pages per minute (ppm). This was roughly 5 seconds slower than the HP Envy 5540. Using Quiet manner, which made a moderate reduction in the racket level, the ET-2550 printed the same document in 53 seconds.

Our six-folio document that mixes text and graphics arrived in 2 minutes, 56 seconds, or two ppm, which was middle of the road. By comparison, the HP Envy 5540 printed the same document roughly half a minute faster, while the HP OfficeJet 4650 took roughly a one-half a minute longer. Using Epson's iPrint app on an Android telephone, a page of text and graphics printed in about half the speed of printing from a PC, taking more than than a minute (1:03) to print a single page.

Where the ET-2550 actually takes a "steady every bit she goes" approach is on sleeky paper. A full-page color photo printed on letter-size paper took almost 6 minutes to arrive. The HP Envy 5540 printed the same photo in less than one-half the time.

The results were like when press in Loftier-Quality way on 4-by-half-dozen-inch photograph newspaper: The ET-2550 printed a photograph in 2:xiii, while the HP Envy 5540 did and so twice equally fast. Reducing the ET-2550's quality setting to standard quickened the pace to 1:16. The finished product wasn't always worth the wait, as we'll hash out beneath.

Re-create and Scan Speed

The ET-2550 produced comparatively faster black-and-white copy times versus its print performance. It made a color copy in 32.3 seconds, which was on a par with other tested ink jets.

It was most impressive in making black-and-white copies, spitting these out in 10.ix seconds, more than than twice as fast as the office-oriented HP OfficeJet 4650. To brand copies even more quickly on the ET-2550, you lot can employ its typhoon manner; one page of typhoon text arrived in seven.iii seconds, though the quality was subpar.

Scanning a colour photo at 600 dpi to JPEG format took most 2 minutes (1:57), which was xv seconds slower than on the HP Envy 5540. These times include a preview scan. Scanning will go much more than quickly if you lot don't need a very high resolution. Scanning at 300 dpi took 43 seconds in colour and 22 seconds at 300 dpi in black and white.

The ET-2550 scanned a document at 300 dpi to a black-and-white PDF in 38.3 seconds, most four times longer than the HP Green-eyed 5540. This included a preview scan of 10 to 15 seconds, which the HP Green-eyed 5540 did non perform in this way.

Impress Quality

The ET-2550 produces very detailed photos with "popular" that should please discerning photographers. Just compared to the HP Envy 5540, which besides produces very high-quality photo glossies, the difference is subtle, and the devil is in the very fine details.

The ET-2550 produces very detailed photos with 'pop' that should please discerning photographers.

The ET-2550 created prints with deeper nighttime shades; very fine details looked a piddling sharper upon close examination. And where the Envy 5540'due south prints had a slightly cloudy cast, the ET-2550's looked clearer, with a little more depth.

The quality of printed text isn't quite equally impressive with the ET-2550. Letter forms were not as potent a black equally those printed by the Green-eyed 5540, and the edges not quite as sharp. That said, neither printer neared the razor-abrupt text you'd expect from a laser printer. Both models made as attractive prints of colour graphics on patently paper.

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Re-create quality left a little to be desired. By comparison, the Green-eyed reproduced colors in richer tones, and retained sharper details in its copies. Scans of photographs looked very sharp, with accurate color and plenty of detail.

Ink/Toner Cost and Yield

Nearly printers offer depression upwards-forepart prices, with the costs of replacing ink adding upwards over time. It's quite the contrary with the ET-2550, which has a loftier initial toll tag of $400, but offers affordable ink in refill bottles. So how long will information technology take for y'all to save what y'all spent up front? Let's do some quick back-of-the-napkin math to make a comparing to the $100 HP Green-eyed 5540, using the page-yield specifications from Epson and HP.

Showtime, let'south presume you print a lot, and that every page is a color page with equal coverage of 5 per centum per colour (the ISO standard). At 500 pages a month (the recommended monthly page book for the ET-2550), it would take almost five months to save the $300 extra you paid versus the Green-eyed 5540.

Despite the cost per folio, the difference in buy cost means it will take quite a few prints before you recoup your investment in the ET-2550.

For this quick adding, I assumed use of high-yield cartridges in the Green-eyed 5540, though I didn't include HP's ink-subscription plan, which offers additional savings. Costs per colour page using these specifications are fifteen.6 cents for the Envy 5540 and less than a cent (0.93 cents to exist precise) for the ET-2550. To save $300, you'd need to print more than than ii,000 pages. Price per black-and-white page for the ET-2550 is but 0.3 cents versus six cents for the Envy 5540. If you lot printed 500 text pages a calendar month, it would take five,291 pages, or ten and a half months, to recoup that $300. And so, despite the dramatic divergence in cost per page, the similarly dramatic divergence in purchase toll means it will take quite a few prints before you recoup your investment in the ET-2550.

Setup

If you lot've never filled an ink tank before, you're likely wondering how messy the procedure is. I plant it simple to open the ink bottles and pour the ink into the ET-2550's reservoirs without unintentionally making a Jackson Pollock painting on my desk. I only got a few tiny drops of ink on my fingers in the procedure.

Setting up the ET-2550 on my network was like shooting fish in a barrel. The menus offer a WPS mode, in which pressing a push on my wireless router added the printer to my network.

Startup Time

The ET-2550 is fast to start up. The home screen on LCD appeared at 6 seconds, which was significantly faster than on the Envy 5540, which took almost 12 seconds. The ET-2550 kicked out its first copy at eighteen.7 seconds.

Software

The ET-2250 comes with a bones software suite for press, scanning and copying. The Epson Connect program allows you to print and scan remotely, including a browse-to-deject function and an email-print part that lets you transport an email to the printer'southward unique email address to automatically print the file. Using the iPrint app, you can print from an Android or iOS mobile device. All the same, at least on an Android device, you volition need to open your intended document via the app: The Epson ET-2550 does not show upward in the printers list if you lot open up a document in its native application and attempt to print from there.

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The software print driver warns confronting operating the printer when the amount of ink falls below a line on the ink tanks, since that could damage the printer. The printer'southward LCD issues a similar alert, repeatedly, to check ink levels. Epson says that without impairment, the permanent print head is expected to last the life of the printer.

Bottom Line

The ET-2550 offers a dramatic reduction in ink costs and produces fantabulous photo prints and scans. Serious photographers will honey the sharpness and depth of the ET-2550's glossy photo prints — and given their heavy apply of ink, stand to benefit the most from this model'due south unique, refillable ink tanks. Photo print times are slow, all the same. And although the ET-2550 makes blackness-and-white copies chop-chop, its middle-of-the-road text and copy quality limit this printer's versatility.

Eric Butterfield is a freelance writer and musician from California. His work has appeared in PC Globe mag, CNET, Taproot, and Modify Action — plus Tom's Guide, of course — while his music has appeared in more than 260 Television show episodes for major networks such equally NBC, Hulu, BBC America, and more. You tin can check out his piece of work on Spotify.