The Husband has a home office where he works when not travelling the globe and his work requires the production of complex, technological documentation for clients and for sales presentation materials such as hand-outs and printed slides.
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| The Epson ET-2500 Ecotank Printer |
My printing needs are simpler - the odd e-book (I still love to read hard copy!), maps, e-tickets, order confirmation slips and invoices.
You can bet that it will have a paper jam when you really need to print out something urgently - an e-ticket or map, for example - or that it will announce it needs a cartridge change on a Sunday at 4 pm.
According to Epson, we're not alone - with 56% of us having had 'printer panic'. I don't know about you but I have quite enough to worry about as it is!
We were recently given the opportunity to review the Epson ET-2500, one of Epson's new EcoTank printers which can save you up to 70% of your printing costs due to its integrated high capacity ink tanks.
The Epson ET-2500 is a 3-in-1 inkjet printer with print, copy and scan features. It's the first time we have had a photocopying facility at home, having previously had to trudge over to our local library with a pocket full of 5p pieces and a prayer that the machine was actually working.
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| Finally, a photocopier at home! |
This printer also comes supplied with 2 years of ink having four colour 70ml Epson genuine ink bottles in the box, which make it easy, clean and quick to fill the ink tanks.
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| The printer comes with four bottles of ink to add to the tank |
Best of all you can say goodbye to ink cartridges.
Because the ink tanks are high volume and refillable, the ink should last you far longer than the traditional ink cartridges.
The printer also has mobile printing. It is equipped with Wi-Fi, so that you can use the Epson Connect features.
The ET-2500 uses Epson's own Micro Piezo technology for excellent-quality print-outs.
Mono prints are delivered at a rate of 9.2 pages per minute while it can issue 4.5 colour pages per minute.
The Epson ET-2500 retails at £229.99.
So we gave the Epson ET-2500 a thorough road test over the period of one week to see how it compared with our old printer.
What we loved
- Compact
- Easy to maintain
- Pulls in paper without a hitch (unlike our old printer)
- Good quality printing in both mono and colour
- 3 year extended warranty
- Lots of ink compared to other printers and cartridge designs - will last a long time
- Refill costs currently look well priced making this a cost effective printer
- Connects over Wifi - no need to use cables
- Reasonable speed for an ink-jet
- Multi-function printer - In built scanner and copier facility
What we loved less
- Slower than a laser
- Does not automatically wake up once the printer has gone into sleep mode (Wifi)
- Needs manual intervention to print duplex
- Slow print time for detailed graphics
- Long set-up time - 20 mins to charge the ink.
- Needs Epson driver
This is a great multi-functional printer which would suit a home office where bulk printing is an occasional, rather than a constant event. If you need to print out a set of hand-outs and produce a high-spec technical document, it is ideal. Having the photocopying and scanning functions included is an added bonus.
I think that if you are constantly churning out multi-page documents then you may be better off considering a laser printer - and possibly asking your boss for an office!
There is an Epson Easy Photo Print tool which allows you to correct and position your photos, plus add frames but I was unable to print out a photo of suitable quality using normal copying paper (not surprisingly). Ultra glossy paper is recommended so this function was not fully tested.
The price of the Epson ET-2500 is very reasonable, in our view (£229.99), especially when you factor in the savings you'll make from not having to buy and replace ink cartridges.
It's a great, economical and environmentally friendly home office printer, best suited for daily correspondence, small scale bulk printing and family printing.
