Epson Eco Tank ET-4500
Whenever we buy a printer, the first and foremost factor we wish to have is an excellent print quality and low running cost of print outputs. The main complaint with most of the printers is its high cost of the ink cartridge. This printer has overcome this problem with the built-in ink tanks. Now it has become easy with the Epson’s EcoTank ET-4500. This wireless enabled printer can print 4000 mono and 6500 color pages.
This printer offers two full sets of ink bottles that should last for a claimed total of 11,000 pages. When they do run out, new ink is so cheap that the cost per page is just 0.49p. Even the most competitive cartridge-based inkjets will cost about six times that to run. EcoTank ET-4550 is identical to Epson’s WorkForce WF-2650 in terms of features. The only exception is that it adds an ethernet connector and mainly it doesn’t use ink cartridges. Rather it has ink tanks on the side of the printer.
Design and Features:
The EcoTank ET-4550 is designed to offer Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi direct as connections. The only flaw with this printer is it can’t print automatic duplex pages. It’s designed with only a mono LCD panel. There’s no touchscreen and moreover, the print engine is slow. The printer has a 50-sheet ADF fitted to its scanner and in front of this is a full-width control panel at a fixed angle. This includes a number pad, the navigation arrows, and buttons for mono and color copies. The display has a sensible menu layout with graphics.
This device can support for both mobile printing and scanning. The printers’ paper handling capacity is limited to 150 sheets. This capacity makes the printer more suitable for personal use and light use. Its features include the ability to print and fax from, as well as scan to, a PC, plus standalone copier and fax machine capability.
The EcoTank ET-4550 is a light-weight device with nearly 8kgs and measures 9.5 x 20.3 x 22 inches (HWD). This helps you in moving the printer from desks. the printer comes with 8 ink bottles with 2 bottles for each color.
Connections and Setup:
This printer is the only paper tray that has a capacity of just 100 sheets. It sits at the back of the printer and can be easily loaded. There are also USB and Ethernet sockets at the rear, supplemented by a wireless connection with a WPS setup.
Setting up the Epson EcoTank ET-4500 for the first time involves breaking the caps off the four ink bottles. It includes pulling the foil tops off them and squeezing the ink into the tanks at the right-hand end of the printer. When printing, the display scrolls to “Check your ink levels regularly”. You need to probably fill ink in the cartridge once or twice a year.
Performance:
The speed of Epson results in 9.2ppm for mono print and 4.5ppm for color. Not both of them are particularly quick.When the printer is tested for page preparation time, the fastest was 8.5ppm for mono print with our 20-page and 7.5ppm for the five-page document. This isn’t bad but can be easily improved by less expensive machines such as the Canon MAXIFY MB-2050. This Canon MB-2050 manages 12.5ppm for five-page and 13.5ppm for 20-page prints. The highest color speed of the EcoTank machine was a slow 2.7ppm. Whereas the Canon’s 6.0ppm.
A single-page color copy takes 39 seconds and a five-page mono copy from the ADF takes a long-winded 2mins 28secs. While the Canon MAXIFY MB-2050 takes 28 seconds. In most factors, Canon seems better than the Epson ET-4550.
The Quality of Output:
The quality of Epson’s EcoTank ET-4550 printer output isn’t so good. The output of the EcoTank ET-4500 is quite obvious from a low-end inkjet. Black text is fuzzy and displays twiddles due to one head pass not aligning with the next one completely. The print color output is quite fair however, there are agitating patterns in some shades. Finally, only the photos are well reproduced.
Cost Of Printing:
The cost of printing of the papers is low. It produces a mono page at 0.99p and the color output at 1.25p. If you remove the paper cost of 0.7p, that’s 0.29p and 0.55p per page. When comparing this with the other top printers like the HP, whose Instant Ink subscription service offers 300 pages for a cost of 2.7p for any page, whether it is color or mono.
It’s a thinner, unnamed product. Epson claims the new formulation is necessary because of the time the ink may sit in the tank, but it’s one of the reasons for the relatively poor print quality.
Finally, the Epson EcoTank ET-4550 is a printer that outputs a good quality with low cost. It is a wireless printer that enables Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi direct as connections.
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