As you can imagine with such a large family who home educate, work from home, have kids who attend various social clubs as well as general forms to be filled out we spend a lot of time printing and a lot of money on ink. Our printer, despite supposedly being a good model, causes no end of problems, never seeming to connect to our computers to print or scan as it is meant to. You can probably understand how excited we were when we were offered the chance to try out a brand new Epson EcoTank printer.
Epson EcoTank printers are unlike any other because rather than using ink cartridges, each of the four printers uses ink bottles. All you have to do is fill the ink tanks and you’re good to go. All printers come with enough ink to print at least 6,000 pages in colour, and 4,500 in black ink. In many households this is thought to be enough for up to two years. This is a huge money-saver in any household or home office, whether they use their printer daily or once a month. In fact, Epson estimates that you could save an astonishing 70% of printing costs by using an EcoTank printer.
We have the Epson ET-4500. It is a stylishly smart-looking printer that successfully scans, faxes, prints and photocopies. You can use your smartphone to quickly print out a document by downloading the Epson iPrint app or you can email over a print job to the ET-4500 from absolutely anywhere!
It was remarkably easy to set up and filling up the ink tanks was much faster than installing cartridges. There are four tanks – one for each colour. To refill the tanks just remove the foil lid from the bottle of ink, replace the cap and twist the tip off. Then slowly pour into the tank until it reaches the fill line.
Despite being as careful as possible we did accidentally get a small amount of ink on our hands but aside from giving us multi-coloured fingers there was no problem. If you’re clumsy like us and would like to avoid the marks you might want to wear a pair of gloves! However keep in mind that while the act of putting the ink into the tanks is fast, the printer does then need to charge the ink which can take up to 20 minutes. Therefore we’d suggest ensuring you have plenty of ink before that all-important time-pressed printing emergency calls!
The machine can be set up without the fax facility which is what we opted to do. This meant we didn’t have to worry about it being close enough to a phone line in order to insert the cable into the machine. The Wi-Fi facility enables you to set the machine up quickly and painlessly from wherever it is best placed in the room even if it’s not near your actual workstation.
The printer has an audible alert feature which beeps as you set and use it. This can be turned off through the settings options. Setting the paper size and printing requirements is extremely easy to do through the display screen on the machine enabling you to switch effortlessly between different sizes and styles needed between jobs. The print quality is absolutely fantastic with clear text and bright colours and the speed at which it prints is also a wonderful advantage.
Having had issues with scanners before we were extremely impressed with the Scan to Cloud function. This allows you to scan through the machine and it immediately sends it to any of a selection of destinations which you add once and save the information of through Epsonconnect.com. Destinations can include any email address or directly to your Google Drive, making scanning much simpler and quicker.
It isn’t a cheap end printer which might initially put you off but we think that it certainly is a worthwhile investment in the long run. Not only does it offer the multi-function facility of combining a printer, photocopier, fax and scanner in one but the amount of money saved on ink alone over the years will ensure it pays for itself. Quality-wise, it’s a sturdy model that is aesthetically pleasing as well as being well-designed and simple to use. Its practicality and versatility means it will cover the needs of even the busiest and largest of households, whilst its size and design ensures it doesn’t look out of place.
You can buy an Epson ET-4500 printer from Amazon here. Alternatively you can click here to view the full range on the Epson website.
