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Tom's Guide Verdict

While this printer is pricey upwardly forepart, the ET-2550'south refillable ink tanks make information technology very economical over fourth dimension and a good fit for people with heavy press demands.

Pros

+
Very low cost per folio
+
Fantabulous photo-print and browse quality
+
Fast at black-and-white copying
+
Fast to start upwards

Cons

-
Loftier up-front end toll
-
Slow scanning and photograph printing

The Epson Expression ET-2550 EcoTank ($400) offers ane of the most enticing propositions in today's ink-jet printer market: inexpensive ink. Since this printer has four refillable ink tanks instead of replaceable ink cartridges, y'all buy inks past the canteen, not past the cartridge. The resulting toll per page is a fraction of what you pay with competing models. Merely the high upward-front toll makes the deal sound a little less sweet: Models with similar features toll equally lilliputian as $100.

Design

The compartment containing the four ink tanks sticks out from the right side of the unit, giving the ET-2550 a different look than that of printers using cartridges. Here, you lift a encompass, revealing the four tanks, with their pop-off caps.

The forepart command console has few buttons and a small, i.4-inch screen, which makes stand-lonely performance less than optimal, especially since it'due south not a touch brandish. When you employ the command panel to initiate a browse, for example, the screen offers no settings card for changing the resolution. You lot need to practice that kind of adjustment on a PC.

The ET-2550 prints, scans and copies, but has no fax. Its unmarried, 100-canvass input tray sticks up from the back of the unit, and you load paper vertically. There is no defended secondary tray for photograph paper or other specialty media, and so yous'll have to swap media when switching impress tasks. An SD Card slot on the forepart panel, to the left of the output tray, conveniently lets y'all print from your camera's retention card; however, you can't scan a document to a carte du jour in the slot.

Print Speed

The ET-2550 isn't particularly fast at printing everyday documents on apparently newspaper. It printed our v-folio text document in 42 seconds, or seven.1 pages per minute (ppm). This was roughly v seconds slower than the HP Envy 5540. Using Repose mode, which made a moderate reduction in the noise level, the ET-2550 printed the same certificate in 53 seconds.

Our half-dozen-page certificate 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 same document roughly half a infinitesimal faster, while the HP OfficeJet 4650 took roughly a half a minute longer. Using Epson's iPrint app on an Android phone, a folio of text and graphics printed in almost one-half the speed of press from a PC, taking more a minute (ane:03) to impress a single page.

Where the ET-2550 really takes a "steady equally she goes" approach is on sleeky paper. A full-folio color photo printed on alphabetic character-size newspaper took nigh half-dozen minutes to make it. The HP Envy 5540 printed the same photo in less than half the time.

The results were similar when press in High-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'due south quality setting to standard quickened the stride to 1:xvi. The finished production wasn't always worth the wait, as we'll talk over below.

Copy and Scan Speed

The ET-2550 produced insufficiently faster black-and-white copy times versus its impress performance. It made a colour copy in 32.3 seconds, which was on a par with other tested ink jets.

Information technology was most impressive in making black-and-white copies, spitting these out in 10.9 seconds, more than than twice as fast as the role-oriented HP OfficeJet 4650. To make copies fifty-fifty more quickly on the ET-2550, y'all tin use its typhoon mode; ane page of typhoon text arrived in 7.3 seconds, though the quality was subpar.

Scanning a color photo at 600 dpi to JPEG format took well-nigh 2 minutes (i:57), which was 15 seconds slower than on the HP Envy 5540. These times include a preview scan. Scanning will become much more than chop-chop if you don't demand 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, almost four times longer than the HP Envy 5540. This included a preview scan of 10 to 15 seconds, which the HP Envy 5540 did non 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 besides produces very high-quality photo glossies, the difference is subtle, and the devil is in the very fine details.

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

The ET-2550 created prints with deeper dark shades; very fine details looked a picayune sharper upon close examination. And where the Envy 5540's prints had a slightly cloudy cast, the ET-2550'due south looked clearer, with a piffling more than depth.

The quality of printed text isn't quite as impressive with the ET-2550. Letter forms were not as strong a black as those printed past the Envy 5540, and the edges not quite every bit precipitous. That said, neither printer neared the razor-abrupt text you'd expect from a laser printer. Both models made as bonny prints of colour graphics on evidently paper.

More: Best All-in-1 Printers

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

Ink/Toner Toll and Yield

Nearly printers offer low up-front prices, with the costs of replacing ink adding upwardly over time. Information technology'due south quite the opposite with the ET-2550, which has a high initial price tag of $400, but offers affordable ink in refill bottles. And so how long will it accept for you to save what you spent up forepart? Let's practice 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.

First, permit'south assume you print a lot, and that every page is a color page with equal coverage of five percentage per colour (the ISO standard). At 500 pages a month (the recommended monthly folio book for the ET-2550), it would take about five months to save the $300 extra you paid versus the Envy 5540.

Despite the cost per folio, the divergence in buy cost means it will take quite a few prints before yous recoup your investment in the ET-2550.

For this quick calculation, I assumed apply of high-yield cartridges in the Envy 5540, though I didn't include HP's ink-subscription programme, which offers boosted savings. Costs per color page using these specifications are 15.6 cents for the Green-eyed 5540 and less than a cent (0.93 cents to be precise) for the ET-2550. To salvage $300, y'all'd need to print more than than 2,000 pages. Toll per black-and-white page for the ET-2550 is simply 0.three cents versus 6 cents for the Green-eyed 5540. If you printed 500 text pages a calendar month, information technology would take v,291 pages, or 10 and a one-half months, to compensate that $300. Then, despite the dramatic divergence in cost per page, the similarly dramatic difference in buy cost means it volition take quite a few prints before you recoup your investment in the ET-2550.

Setup

If you've never filled an ink tank earlier, you're likely wondering how messy the procedure is. I institute it uncomplicated to open the ink bottles and pour the ink into the ET-2550'due south reservoirs without unintentionally making a Jackson Pollock painting on my desk. I simply 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 offer a WPS mode, in which pressing a button on my wireless router added the printer to my network.

Startup Fourth dimension

The ET-2550 is fast to start up. The domicile screen on LCD appeared at 6 seconds, which was significantly faster than on the Green-eyed 5540, which took almost 12 seconds. The ET-2550 kicked out its showtime copy at 18.seven seconds.

Software

The ET-2250 comes with a basic software suite for printing, scanning and copying. The Epson Connect program allows you to print and browse remotely, including a scan-to-cloud function and an email-print part that lets yous send an email to the printer's unique email address to automatically print the file. Using the iPrint app, you can print from an Android or iOS mobile device. Still, at least on an Android device, you will need to open up your intended document via the app: The Epson ET-2550 does not show up in the printers list if y'all open a document in its native awarding and attempt to print from there.

More: Best Photograph Volume - Photography Book Printing Services

The software impress commuter warns confronting operating the printer when the amount of ink falls beneath a line on the ink tanks, since that could damage the printer. The printer'south LCD problems a similar warning, repeatedly, to check ink levels. Epson says that without damage, the permanent print head is expected to last the life of the printer.

Bottom Line

The ET-2550 offers a dramatic reduction in ink costs and produces excellent photograph prints and scans. Serious photographers will love the sharpness and depth of the ET-2550's glossy photograph prints — and given their heavy employ of ink, stand up to benefit the most from this model's unique, refillable ink tanks. Photograph print times are tedious, however. And although the ET-2550 makes blackness-and-white copies quickly, its middle-of-the-route text and copy quality limit this printer's versatility.

Eric Butterfield is a freelance writer and musician from California. His work has appeared in PC Earth magazine, CNET, Taproot, and Alter Activity — plus Tom's Guide, of course — while his music has appeared in more than 260 TV show episodes for major networks such as NBC, Hulu, BBC America, and more. Y'all can check out his piece of work on Spotify.