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Tom's Guide Verdict

While this printer is pricey up front, the ET-2550'south refillable ink tanks arrive very economical over fourth dimension and a good fit for people with heavy printing demands.

Pros

+
Very low toll per folio
+
Excellent photo-impress and scan quality
+
Fast at black-and-white copying
+
Fast to start up

Cons

-
High up-forepart cost
-
Deadening 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: cheap ink. Since this printer has four refillable ink tanks instead of replaceable ink cartridges, yous buy inks by the bottle, not by the cartridge. The resulting toll per page is a fraction of what you pay with competing models. But the high upwards-front cost makes the deal sound a niggling less sweetness: Models with like features cost as niggling as $100.

Design

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

The front end control panel has few buttons and a small, 1.4-inch screen, which makes stand-lone operation less than optimal, particularly since it's not a touch brandish. When you use the command panel to initiate a browse, for example, the screen offers no settings menu for changing the resolution. You lot need to do that kind of adjustment on a PC.

The ET-2550 prints, scans and copies, but has no fax. Its single, 100-canvass input tray sticks upwardly from the back of the unit of measurement, and you load paper vertically. There is no dedicated secondary tray for photo paper or other specialty media, so yous'll have to swap media when switching impress tasks. An SD Carte du jour slot on the front end console, to the left of the output tray, conveniently lets you lot print from your photographic camera'south memory carte; however, yous can't scan a document to a card in the slot.

Print Speed

The ET-2550 isn't particularly fast at press everyday documents on plain paper. It printed our five-page text certificate in 42 seconds, or seven.1 pages per minute (ppm). This was roughly 5 seconds slower than the HP Green-eyed 5540. Using Quiet mode, which made a moderate reduction in the noise level, the ET-2550 printed the same document in 53 seconds.

Our half-dozen-folio document that mixes text and graphics arrived in 2 minutes, 56 seconds, or ii ppm, which was middle of the road. Past comparing, the HP Envy 5540 printed the same certificate 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 phone, a page of text and graphics printed in about one-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 really takes a "steady as she goes" approach is on glossy newspaper. A full-folio colour photo printed on letter-size paper took almost 6 minutes to arrive. The HP Envy 5540 printed the same photo in less than half the time.

The results were similar when press in Loftier-Quality mode on four-past-6-inch photo newspaper: The ET-2550 printed a photo in two:13, while the HP Envy 5540 did so twice equally fast. Reducing the ET-2550's quality setting to standard quickened the pace to i:sixteen. The finished production wasn't always worth the await, as we'll talk over beneath.

Copy and Browse Speed

The ET-2550 produced insufficiently faster black-and-white copy times versus its print operation. It made a colour 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 ten.9 seconds, more than than twice as fast as the office-oriented HP OfficeJet 4650. To make copies even more quickly on the ET-2550, you can utilize its draft mode; one page of draft text arrived in 7.iii seconds, though the quality was subpar.

Scanning a color photo at 600 dpi to JPEG format took almost 2 minutes (1:57), which was 15 seconds slower than on the HP Envy 5540. These times include a preview browse. Scanning will go much more apace if you don't need a very high resolution. Scanning at 300 dpi took 43 seconds in color and 22 seconds at 300 dpi in blackness and white.

The ET-2550 scanned a document at 300 dpi to a black-and-white PDF in 38.iii seconds, virtually four times longer than the HP Envy 5540. This included a preview scan of ten to 15 seconds, which the HP Envy 5540 did not perform in this mode.

Print Quality

The ET-2550 produces very detailed photos with "pop" that should please discerning photographers. But compared to the HP Envy 5540, which also produces very high-quality photo glossies, the divergence 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 night shades; very fine details looked a picayune sharper upon close examination. And where the Envy 5540's prints had a slightly cloudy cast, the ET-2550's looked clearer, with a footling more depth.

The quality of printed text isn't quite as impressive with the ET-2550. Alphabetic character forms were not as strong a black as those printed by the Envy 5540, and the edges not quite as sharp. That said, neither printer neared the razor-precipitous text yous'd wait from a laser printer. Both models made equally bonny prints of color graphics on plain newspaper.

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Re-create quality left a little to be desired. By comparing, the Envy 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

Well-nigh printers offering low upwardly-front prices, with the costs of replacing ink calculation upward over time. It'south quite the contrary with the ET-2550, which has a high initial price tag of $400, just offers affordable ink in refill bottles. Then how long will it take for you to save what you spent up front? Allow'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.

First, permit's assume you print a lot, and that every folio is a color folio with equal coverage of 5 percent per colour (the ISO standard). At 500 pages a month (the recommended monthly page book for the ET-2550), it would have near 5 months to relieve the $300 extra you paid versus the Green-eyed 5540.

Despite the cost per page, the difference in purchase cost means it volition take quite a few prints before you recoup your investment in the ET-2550.

For this quick adding, I causeless utilize of high-yield cartridges in the Envy 5540, though I didn't include HP'southward ink-subscription program, which offers additional savings. Costs per color page using these specifications are 15.6 cents for the Envy 5540 and less than a cent (0.93 cents to exist precise) for the ET-2550. To salvage $300, you'd need to impress more than 2,000 pages. Toll per blackness-and-white page for the ET-2550 is merely 0.3 cents versus 6 cents for the Green-eyed 5540. If y'all printed 500 text pages a month, it would take five,291 pages, or 10 and a half months, to recoup that $300. So, despite the dramatic difference in cost per folio, the similarly dramatic divergence in purchase price means information technology volition take quite a few prints before you recoup your investment in the ET-2550.

Setup

If you've never filled an ink tank before, you're likely wondering how messy the process is. I establish it simple to open the ink bottles and pour the ink into the ET-2550'south 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 piece of cake. The menus offer a WPS mode, in which pressing a push button on my wireless router added the printer to my network.

Startup Time

The ET-2550 is fast to beginning up. The home screen on LCD appeared at 6 seconds, which was significantly faster than on the Green-eyed 5540, which took near 12 seconds. The ET-2550 kicked out its first copy at 18.vii seconds.

Software

The ET-2250 comes with a basic software suite for printing, scanning and copying. The Epson Connect program allows you to print and scan remotely, including a scan-to-cloud function and an email-print office that lets you send an e-mail to the printer's unique email address to automatically print the file. Using the iPrint app, you can impress from an Android or iOS mobile device. However, at least on an Android device, y'all will need to open your intended certificate via the app: The Epson ET-2550 does non show up in the printers list if you open a certificate in its native application and endeavor to impress from in that location.

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The software print commuter warns against operating the printer when the corporeality of ink falls below a line on the ink tanks, since that could damage the printer. The printer's LCD problems a similar warning, repeatedly, to check ink levels. Epson says that without damage, the permanent impress head is expected to final the life of the printer.

Bottom Line

The ET-2550 offers a dramatic reduction in ink costs and produces splendid photograph prints and scans. Serious photographers will love the sharpness and depth of the ET-2550's glossy photo prints — and given their heavy use of ink, stand to benefit the almost from this model's unique, refillable ink tanks. Photo print times are slow, however. And although the ET-2550 makes black-and-white copies rapidly, its middle-of-the-road text and copy quality limit this printer'due south versatility.

Eric Butterfield is a freelance writer and musician from California. His work has appeared in PC Globe magazine, CNET, Taproot, and Alter Activity — plus Tom's Guide, of course — while his music has appeared in more 260 TV prove episodes for major networks such as NBC, Hulu, BBC America, and more. Y'all can cheque out his piece of work on Spotify.