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| EcoTank ET-4500* - £299.99 |
One of the main reasons I didn’t have my own printer before now is I’ve always found them unreliable and when you really need something printed you seem to have run out of ink already. This is where Epson have stepped into help and prevent ‘Printer Panic’. Their Ecotank printers promise an impressive maximum of 11,000 pages in both colour and black and white. This is roughly the same as 72 cartridges in a normal printer and will save you 70% on your printing costs.
I was sent the EcoTank ET-4500 to review about three weeks ago and I’ve been using it almost daily since. As a student there is always work, lecture slides and tutorial questions I have to print. I’m the type of person who liked to have it filed away ready to read on paper.
When the printer arrived I found it relatively easy to set-up just following the instructions to the letter. It took a little bit of time but the ink tanks were easier than I expected to fill and I connected it to our network without any problems. I know what I’m doing with my laptop but even if you didn’t the instructions are clear and easy to follow.
I connected the printer to my Wi-Fi so I could print from anywhere in the flat and installed the correct drivers on my MacBook and it was as simple as that. Now all I have to do is click print. As far as printing on normal copy paper goes I’ve found the quality so far excellent in both colour and monochrome. Text is sharp and diagrams come out clear so I couldn’t fault it. Annoyingly I’ve not managed to get proper photo paper to try out yet but from what I’ve seen so far I don’t think it would have any trouble.
The copying function isn’t something I will use a lot but when I tried it out I had two identical documents that I would struggle to tell the difference between. It has a 30-page automatic document feeder to make this even easier. Ideal for when I need to scan in a whole assessment to submit online.
Finally the scanning function is equally as good - I registered the printer with ‘Epson Connect’ so I can scan things to the cloud and it arrives in my inbox just seconds later. There are various options on the printer for choosing document style, document format and cropping style so there is no faffing around. I found scanning in text both easy and good quality. Scanned photos were excellent quality, which is important to me because I don’t want to compromise on photo quality.
This nifty little 4-in-1 machine has some featured I’ve not yet been able to try, the fax machine, mobile print or cloud print. The only disadvantage that comes to mind is the relatively slow speed of printing but this is out weighed with the huge savings on printing costs. It also doesn’t have duplex printing which I find handy to reduce paper use further but it is possible to do it manually.
Each bottle of ink will cost £7.99 to replace but dividing that by 11,000 pages means each sheet should cost less than 0.002p to print. At the moment I’m no where near to confirming this claim of 11,000 pages because I’m just over 200 pages printed but when the ink does finally run out I will definitely be going to check how many pages I have printed.
Most importantly, to me, though this printer has never let me down, it has always worked first time and I’ve not needed to reprint pages because the colours have been off… Touch wood!
Please note that this printer was sent
to me by Epson in return this this review.
This has not affected my opinions in
anyway and all thoughts are my own.
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