Ecouteur Bang Et Olufsen Sans Fil

Tom's Guide Verdict

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

Pros

+
Very depression cost per page
+
Excellent photograph-impress and scan quality
+
Fast at black-and-white copying
+
Fast to start upwards

Cons

-
High up-front cost
-
Irksome scanning and photo printing

The Epson Expression ET-2550 EcoTank ($400) offers one of the virtually enticing propositions in today'south ink-jet printer market: inexpensive ink. Since this printer has four refillable ink tanks instead of replaceable ink cartridges, you buy inks by the canteen, non by the cartridge. The resulting cost per folio is a fraction of what you lot pay with competing models. But the high up-forepart price makes the deal sound a little less sweet: Models with similar features cost as fiddling every bit $100.

Design

The compartment containing the 4 ink tanks sticks out from the correct side of the unit of measurement, giving the ET-2550 a different look than that of printers using cartridges. Hither, you lift a cover, revealing the iv tanks, with their pop-off caps.

The front control console has few buttons and a small, ane.four-inch screen, which makes stand-lone performance less than optimal, especially since it'due south non a impact brandish. When you use the control panel to initiate a browse, for example, the screen offers no settings menu for changing the resolution. You lot need to do that kind of aligning on a PC.

The ET-2550 prints, scans and copies, but has no fax. Its unmarried, 100-sail input tray sticks upward from the back of the unit, and you load paper vertically. There is no defended secondary tray for photograph paper or other specialty media, so you'll have to swap media when switching print tasks. An SD Bill of fare slot on the front end panel, to the left of the output tray, conveniently lets yous print from your camera'southward memory card; even so, yous 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 patently paper. Information technology printed our five-page text document in 42 seconds, or 7.1 pages per minute (ppm). This was roughly 5 seconds slower than the HP Envy 5540. Using Quiet mode, which made a moderate reduction in the racket level, the ET-2550 printed the same document 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 certificate roughly one-half a minute faster, while the HP OfficeJet 4650 took roughly a one-half a minute longer. Using Epson's iPrint app on an Android phone, a page of text and graphics printed in most half the speed of press from a PC, taking more than than a infinitesimal (one:03) to impress a unmarried page.

Where the ET-2550 actually takes a "steady as she goes" approach is on sleeky newspaper. A total-page color photograph printed on letter-size newspaper took nigh 6 minutes to go far. The HP Green-eyed 5540 printed the aforementioned photo in less than half the fourth dimension.

The results were similar when printing in Loftier-Quality mode on four-by-6-inch photo paper: The ET-2550 printed a photo in 2:13, while the HP Envy 5540 did so twice as fast. Reducing the ET-2550'south quality setting to standard quickened the pace to i:16. The finished production wasn't always worth the wait, as we'll hash out below.

Copy and Scan Speed

The ET-2550 produced comparatively faster black-and-white copy times versus its print functioning. Information technology made a color re-create in 32.3 seconds, which was on a par with other tested ink jets.

It was most impressive in making blackness-and-white copies, spitting these out in 10.9 seconds, more than twice as fast as the office-oriented HP OfficeJet 4650. To make copies even more apace on the ET-2550, yous tin can employ its typhoon mode; i folio of draft text arrived in vii.3 seconds, though the quality was subpar.

Scanning a colour photograph at 600 dpi to JPEG format took nigh 2 minutes (ane:57), which was 15 seconds slower than on the HP Envy 5540. These times include a preview scan. Scanning will go much more than quickly if you 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 document at 300 dpi to a black-and-white PDF in 38.3 seconds, most four times longer than the HP Envy 5540. This included a preview scan of 10 to 15 seconds, which the HP Envy 5540 did not perform in this mode.

Print Quality

The ET-2550 produces very detailed photos with "pop" that should please discerning photographers. But compared to the HP Envy 5540, which also produces very high-quality photo glossies, the divergence is subtle, and the devil is in the very fine details.

The ET-2550 produces very detailed photos with 'popular' that should please discerning photographers.

The ET-2550 created prints with deeper nighttime shades; very fine details looked a petty 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 as impressive with the ET-2550. Letter forms were not as strong a blackness equally those printed by the Envy 5540, and the edges non quite as sharp. That said, neither printer neared the razor-precipitous text you'd look from a laser printer. Both models fabricated every bit bonny prints of colour graphics on plain paper.

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Copy quality left a little to be desired. By comparing, the Envy reproduced colors in richer tones, and retained sharper details in its copies. Scans of photographs looked very precipitous, with accurate color and plenty of particular.

Ink/Toner Toll and Yield

Most printers offer low upwardly-forepart prices, with the costs of replacing ink adding upwards over time. It's quite the opposite with the ET-2550, which has a loftier initial toll tag of $400, but offers affordable ink in refill bottles. So how long will it take for you to save what y'all spent up front? Let's do some quick back-of-the-napkin math to make a comparison to the $100 HP Envy 5540, using the folio-yield specifications from Epson and HP.

Get-go, allow'due south assume you print a lot, and that every page is a color page with equal coverage of v pct per color (the ISO standard). At 500 pages a month (the recommended monthly page volume for the ET-2550), it would accept well-nigh five months to save the $300 extra you paid versus the Envy 5540.

Despite the cost per page, the departure in purchase cost means it volition have quite a few prints before yous recoup your investment in the ET-2550.

For this quick adding, I assumed employ of high-yield cartridges in the Envy 5540, though I didn't include HP'due south ink-subscription program, 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 exist precise) for the ET-2550. To salvage $300, you'd need to impress more 2,000 pages. Cost per blackness-and-white folio for the ET-2550 is just 0.three cents versus 6 cents for the Envy 5540. If you printed 500 text pages a calendar month, it would accept 5,291 pages, or 10 and a half months, to recoup that $300. So, despite the dramatic difference in toll per page, the similarly dramatic difference in buy cost means it volition accept quite a few prints before you recoup your investment in the ET-2550.

Setup

If you lot've never filled an ink tank before, you're likely wondering how messy the process is. I found it uncomplicated to open the ink bottles and pour the ink into the ET-2550'south reservoirs without unintentionally making a Jackson Pollock painting on my desk. I only got a few tiny drops of ink on my fingers in the process.

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

Startup Time

The ET-2550 is fast to start upward. The habitation screen on LCD appeared at 6 seconds, which was significantly faster than on the Envy 5540, which took nigh 12 seconds. The ET-2550 kicked out its first copy at eighteen.vii seconds.

Software

The ET-2250 comes with a basic software suite for printing, scanning and copying. The Epson Connect programme allows you to print and scan remotely, including a scan-to-cloud part and an electronic mail-print office that lets you lot send an e-mail to the printer's unique email accost to automatically print the file. Using the iPrint app, you can impress from an Android or iOS mobile device. Yet, at least on an Android device, y'all will demand to open your intended document via the app: The Epson ET-2550 does not show up in the printers list if you open a document in its native awarding and effort to impress from there.

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The software impress driver warns against operating the printer when the amount of ink falls beneath a line on the ink tanks, since that could damage the printer. The printer's LCD issues a like warning, repeatedly, to check ink levels. Epson says that without impairment, the permanent print head is expected to last 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 will dear the sharpness and depth of the ET-2550'southward glossy photo prints — and given their heavy use of ink, stand to do good the most from this model's unique, refillable ink tanks. Photograph print times are slow, however. And although the ET-2550 makes black-and-white copies speedily, its middle-of-the-route text and copy quality limit this printer'southward versatility.

Eric Butterfield is a freelance writer and musician from California. His work has appeared in PC World mag, CNET, Taproot, and Alter Action — plus Tom's Guide, of grade — while his music has appeared in more than 260 TV prove episodes for major networks such as NBC, Hulu, BBC America, and more. You can check out his work on Spotify.