Difference Wifi 5 Et Wifi 6

Tom'southward Guide Verdict

While this printer is pricey up front end, the ET-2550's refillable ink tanks brand it very economic over time and a good fit for people with heavy press demands.

Pros

+
Very depression cost per page
+
Splendid photo-print and scan quality
+
Fast at black-and-white copying
+
Fast to start up

Cons

-
Loftier up-front end price
-
Slow scanning and photo printing

The Epson Expression ET-2550 EcoTank ($400) offers one of the almost enticing propositions in today'south ink-jet printer market place: cheap ink. Since this printer has four refillable ink tanks instead of replaceable ink cartridges, you buy inks past the bottle, non by the cartridge. The resulting cost per page is a fraction of what you pay with competing models. Simply the high up-front end toll makes the deal sound a piffling less sweet: Models with like features price equally piddling 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 look than that of printers using cartridges. Here, you lot lift a comprehend, revealing the iv tanks, with their pop-off caps.

The front control panel has few buttons and a pocket-size, 1.4-inch screen, which makes stand-alone operation less than optimal, especially since it'south not a touch display. When you use the command panel to initiate a scan, for case, the screen offers no settings menu for irresolute 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 up from the back of the unit, and y'all load newspaper vertically. At that place is no dedicated secondary tray for photo paper or other specialty media, then y'all'll have to swap media when switching print tasks. An SD Carte slot on the forepart panel, to the left of the output tray, conveniently lets y'all print from your camera's memory bill of fare; however, you can't scan a document to a card in the slot.

Print Speed

The ET-2550 isn't particularly fast at printing everyday documents on plain paper. It printed our five-folio text document in 42 seconds, or 7.one pages per infinitesimal (ppm). This was roughly 5 seconds slower than the HP Envy 5540. Using Tranquility mode, which fabricated a moderate reduction in the noise level, the ET-2550 printed the same certificate in 53 seconds.

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

Where the ET-2550 actually takes a "steady as she goes" approach is on glossy paper. A full-page colour photo printed on letter-size paper took most 6 minutes to arrive. The HP Green-eyed 5540 printed the same photo in less than half the time.

The results were similar when printing in High-Quality manner on four-past-6-inch photo paper: The ET-2550 printed a photo in two:xiii, while the HP Envy 5540 did and then twice as fast. Reducing the ET-2550's quality setting to standard quickened the pace to i:16. The finished production wasn't ever worth the look, as we'll discuss below.

Re-create and Browse Speed

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

Information technology was most impressive in making black-and-white copies, spitting these out in ten.9 seconds, more twice as fast as the office-oriented HP OfficeJet 4650. To make copies even more apace on the ET-2550, yous can use its typhoon mode; one page of draft text arrived in vii.3 seconds, though the quality was subpar.

Scanning a color photograph at 600 dpi to JPEG format took nigh 2 minutes (1:57), which was 15 seconds slower than on the HP Green-eyed 5540. These times include a preview scan. Scanning will become much more quickly if yous don't need a very high resolution. Scanning at 300 dpi took 43 seconds in color and 22 seconds at 300 dpi in black and white.

The ET-2550 scanned a certificate at 300 dpi to a blackness-and-white PDF in 38.iii seconds, almost four times longer than the HP Envy 5540. This included a preview scan of ten to 15 seconds, which the HP Envy 5540 did non perform in this fashion.

Impress Quality

The ET-2550 produces very detailed photos with "pop" that should please discerning photographers. Simply compared to the HP Envy 5540, which also 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 dark shades; very fine details looked a piddling sharper upon shut examination. And where the Envy 5540's 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 every bit impressive with the ET-2550. Letter of the alphabet forms were not every bit potent a black as those printed by the Envy 5540, and the edges non quite as abrupt. That said, neither printer neared the razor-sharp text you'd expect from a laser printer. Both models fabricated equally bonny prints of color graphics on patently newspaper.

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Re-create quality left a little to exist desired. By comparison, the Envy reproduced colors in richer tones, and retained sharper details in its copies. Scans of photographs looked very abrupt, with accurate color and plenty of item.

Ink/Toner Cost and Yield

Most printers offer low up-front prices, with the costs of replacing ink adding up over time. It'due south quite the opposite with the ET-2550, which has a high initial price tag of $400, but offers affordable ink in refill bottles. So how long will it take for yous to save what you spent upwards front? Allow's do some quick back-of-the-napkin math to brand a comparing to the $100 HP Green-eyed 5540, using the folio-yield specifications from Epson and HP.

Beginning, let's assume you print a lot, and that every folio is a color page with equal coverage of v percent per color (the ISO standard). At 500 pages a month (the recommended monthly folio volume for the ET-2550), it would accept well-nigh five months to salve the $300 extra you paid versus the Envy 5540.

Despite the cost per page, the divergence in purchase price means it will take quite a few prints before you compensate your investment in the ET-2550.

For this quick calculation, I causeless utilise of high-yield cartridges in the Envy 5540, though I didn't include HP's ink-subscription plan, which offers additional savings. Costs per color page using these specifications are 15.half-dozen cents for the Envy 5540 and less than a cent (0.93 cents to be precise) for the ET-2550. To salve $300, you lot'd demand to print more than 2,000 pages. Cost per blackness-and-white folio for the ET-2550 is but 0.iii cents versus 6 cents for the Envy 5540. If you lot printed 500 text pages a month, it would have 5,291 pages, or 10 and a half months, to recoup that $300. So, despite the dramatic difference in cost per page, the similarly dramatic departure in purchase price means it will 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 found it elementary to open the ink bottles and pour the ink into the ET-2550'southward reservoirs without unintentionally making a Jackson Pollock painting on my desk. I simply got a few tiny drops of ink on my fingers in the process.

Setting upward the ET-2550 on my network was easy. The menus offer a WPS mode, in which pressing a button on my wireless router added the printer to my network.

Startup Time

The ET-2550 is fast to showtime up. The home screen on LCD appeared at 6 seconds, which was significantly faster than on the Green-eyed 5540, which took most 12 seconds. The ET-2550 kicked out its showtime re-create at xviii.7 seconds.

Software

The ET-2250 comes with a bones software suite for printing, scanning and copying. The Epson Connect program allows you to print and scan remotely, including a browse-to-cloud part and an email-print part that lets you send an email to the printer'due south unique e-mail address to automatically print the file. Using the iPrint app, you lot can print from an Android or iOS mobile device. Nonetheless, at least on an Android device, yous will demand to open your intended certificate via the app: The Epson ET-2550 does not testify upwardly in the printers list if you open up a document in its native awarding and attempt to print from at that place.

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

Lesser Line

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

Eric Butterfield is a freelance author and musician from California. His piece of work has appeared in PC World mag, CNET, Taproot, and Alter Activity — plus Tom'due south Guide, of course — while his music has appeared in more than 260 Idiot box testify episodes for major networks such equally NBC, Hulu, BBC America, and more. You lot can check out his piece of work on Spotify.