Epson EcoTank ET-2600
Live with the mediocre speeds and quality, love those very reasonable running costs
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £187 (£224 inc VAT) from misco.co.uk
Epson has taken a stand against the exorbitant running costs of inkjet printers, switching cartridges for a system of internal ink tanks refilled using cheaper bottles with enough ink to print up to 6,500 pages. The results are impressive, with mono prints coming in at just 0.24p per page and colour prints costing around half-a-penny.
Note there’s potential for mess when refilling and the printer needs to charge the ink before use – a process that takes roughly 20 minutes. A rubber cap keeps the ink securely in the printer, however, and Epson has made the tanks semi-opaque in places so you can literally see the current ink levels.
You might expect there to be compromises elsewhere, and indeed there are. The ET-2600 isn’t a fast printer, hitting speeds of only 9.9ppm in monochrome and 4.1ppm in colour. Our A4 photomontage took over two-and-a-half minutes to arrive. The mechanism is also surprisingly loud when printing multipage documents, dragging pages in and spitting them out with undue force and dropping them in the output tray in straight numerical sequential order, rather than last-page to first as other printers do, so you’ll need to rearrange them after printing.
Quality isn’t perfect, either. Text suffers slightly from ragged edges, while photos printed on plain paper are particularly dull and lifeless. White text on a red background loses definition, and charts aren’t printed with the clarity of the best office printers. That said, while colours are still a little subdued, photo prints on glossy paper don’t look bad at all.
There’s no touchscreen – an unusual omission for a home inkjet – but this doesn’t seriously affect usability, and Epson’s web-based setup and Wi-Fi configuration routine is effective. You can also print from the cloud or via email using the Epson Connect cloud service, or direct from your tablet or smartphone using the Epson iPrint app. We also liked Epson’s scanner functionality, with scanning and copying at the touch of a button and a fully featured but intuitive Windows scanning applet.
This isn’t the most capable printer – and it certainly isn’t the fastest – but if you print a lot and you’re willing to compromise on speed and quality, the low-running costs could make it worth your while.