Epson EcoTank ET-2750
A well-balanced ink tank multifunction printer with a good mix of price, running costs, quality and features
SCORE
PRICE £217 (£260 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk
The ET-2750 is far more down t to earth than its extra-terrestria extra-terrestrial name suggests. It’s one of the most eco-friendly printers on test, a as it uses refillable ink tanks instead of cartridges. These tanks take up more mor space than the traditional approach but the printer is no larger than a regular MFP (multifunction printer). printer
You need to pour ink into the tan tanks before you switch it on. This sounds scary but is almost impossible to get wrong: break open the bottle’s seal, open the printer lid and upend the bottle onto the correct tank. You can’t even accidentally pour it in the wrong one because Epson has moulded a key shape into the neck of the bottle.
Once it’s slotted into place, a couple of seconds pass then the ink starts glugging into the printer. It’s better thought through than Canon’s process, which involves doublechecking you have the correct bottle for the tank and squeezing them to force out the ink.
The ET-2750 comes with two bottles of black ink and a bottle each of cyan, magenta and yellow, which is enough to print 15,000 mono pages and 6,000 pages of colour. To put that into perspective, the equivalent cartridge cost for the Labs Winner Canon Pixma TS8350 is around £500 – and that’s only for the blank ink.
Most of the printer’s operation can be done from a PC or mobile device, which can be connected via USB or Wi-Fi. A colour LCD sits ready for the times when you need to control the printer from the device, but it isn’t a touchscreen. Instead, you use the bank of buttons to scroll through options with the arrow keys and select with the OK button.
This is clearly a cost-saving measure and it’s annoying: we found ourselves jabbing at it, willing a response, before realising our mistake and reverting to the buttons. Still, the only time you’ll really need it is to make copies or print from the SD card slot on the front. And we’d far rather Epson lost a touchscreen than its valuable ability to automatically print on both sides of a piece of paper.
Also note the lack of a paper tray at the bottom of the printer, so you’re reliant on the 100-sheet capacity of the rear tray. That’s fine if you mainly print on plain paper, but if you regularly switch to photo paper or other paper stock then you have to go through the rigmarole of loading your plain paper in and out every time.
There’s no automatic document feeder either, but fortunately Epson doesn’t skimp on scan quality.
There’s plenty of detail, accurate colours and copies looked good too.
When it comes to speed, there’s one area where this printer excelled in our tests, and that’s the time it takes to produce its first mono print. We timed this as ten seconds from the click of the Print button to the moment the print landed in the out tray, which is joint fastest with the Epson Expression Home XP-4100.
The remainder of the speed test results all sat resolutely between the middle and the bottom of the speed charts. This means it’s fast enough when printing the odd page but, if you need pages and pages of documents to be printed in a hurry, this isn’t the model for the job.
“We timed this as ten seconds from the click of the Print button to the moment the mono print landed in the out tray”
Print quality is a game of two halves. Photo prints are impressive, bettering the photo print quality we saw from Canon’s ink tank rivals.
This was largely down to the Epson’s blacks, which were darker and richer than the dark sections of photos from Canon’s tank printers. In fairness, however, there wasn’t a lot in it.
You should also be happy with the results when printing mono documents such as essays. Where it fell behind Canon’s tank printers was colours on mixed documents, which weren’t quite as rich as its rivals, and it’s well behind the quality we found on the best of cartridgebased inkjets.
It particularly struggled with our colour duplex test, clearly having to print with less ink to ensure that the page was dry before being pulled back into the printer; even so, it still managed to bleed through to the other side on the cheapest paper we used. One answer to that problem is not to skimp on paper quality, and when you’re only using 0.4p worth of ink on each colour print, we don’t feel inclined to complain. It’s not as good as a print that’s 32 times more expensive? We can live with that.
Of course, whether you can live with it will depend on what you need your printer to do. Office work that demands high, presentation-quality colour prints would be asking too much of the Epson ET-2750 . But if you want a versatile printer for a home office, one that’s sufficient for endless school work printouts and decent quality photos, it’s perfectly suited and very cost effective.