Difference Jeu Switch Et Switch Lite

Tom's Guide Verdict

While this printer is pricey upwardly front, the ET-2550's refillable ink tanks make it very economical over time and a skillful fit for people with heavy press demands.

Pros

+
Very low cost per folio
+
Excellent photo-impress and browse quality
+
Fast at black-and-white copying
+
Fast to start up

Cons

-
High up-forepart cost
-
Ho-hum scanning and photo printing

The Epson Expression ET-2550 EcoTank ($400) offers one of the most enticing propositions in today'southward ink-jet printer marketplace: inexpensive ink. Since this printer has four refillable ink tanks instead of replaceable ink cartridges, you buy inks by the bottle, not by the cartridge. The resulting cost per folio is a fraction of what you pay with competing models. Simply the high up-front cost makes the deal audio a little less sweet: Models with similar features price as little equally $100.

Blueprint

The compartment containing the four ink tanks sticks out from the correct side of the unit, giving the ET-2550 a dissimilar look than that of printers using cartridges. Hither, y'all elevator a comprehend, revealing the iv tanks, with their pop-off caps.

The front command console has few buttons and a small, 1.iv-inch screen, which makes stand up-lone functioning less than optimal, specially since it'south not a touch display. When you use the control panel to initiate a scan, for case, the screen offers no settings menu for irresolute the resolution. You need to do that kind of adjustment on a PC.

The ET-2550 prints, scans and copies, but has no fax. Its unmarried, 100-canvas input tray sticks up from the back of the unit, and yous load paper vertically. There is no dedicated secondary tray for photo newspaper or other specialty media, so you'll have to swap media when switching print tasks. An SD Carte du jour slot on the front panel, to the left of the output tray, conveniently lets y'all print from your photographic camera's retentivity bill of fare; withal, y'all tin't scan a document to a card in the slot.

Print Speed

The ET-2550 isn't particularly fast at press everyday documents on plain paper. Information technology printed our five-page text document in 42 seconds, or 7.1 pages per minute (ppm). This was roughly v seconds slower than the HP Green-eyed 5540. Using Quiet mode, which fabricated a moderate reduction in the noise level, the ET-2550 printed the same document in 53 seconds.

Our six-page document that mixes text and graphics arrived in ii minutes, 56 seconds, or 2 ppm, which was middle of the road. By comparison, the HP Green-eyed 5540 printed the aforementioned document roughly half a minute 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 about half the speed of printing from a PC, taking more than than a minute (1:03) to print a single page.

Where the ET-2550 really takes a "steady every bit she goes" approach is on sleeky newspaper. A full-page color photograph printed on letter-size paper took nearly vi minutes to arrive. The HP Envy 5540 printed the aforementioned photo in less than half the time.

The results were similar when printing in High-Quality way on four-by-half-dozen-inch photo paper: The ET-2550 printed a photograph in 2:13, while the HP Envy 5540 did so twice equally fast. Reducing the ET-2550'southward quality setting to standard quickened the pace to ane:16. The finished product wasn't always worth the wait, as we'll discuss beneath.

Copy and Scan Speed

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

It was most impressive in making black-and-white copies, spitting these out in 10.9 seconds, more than than twice as fast as the office-oriented HP OfficeJet 4650. To brand copies even more apace on the ET-2550, you can use its draft mode; one page of draft text arrived in 7.iii seconds, though the quality was subpar.

Scanning a color photo at 600 dpi to JPEG format took almost two minutes (1:57), 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, almost 4 times longer than the HP Envy 5540. This included a preview browse of 10 to 15 seconds, which the HP Green-eyed 5540 did not perform in this way.

Print Quality

The ET-2550 produces very detailed photos with "pop" that should please discerning photographers. Just compared to the HP Green-eyed 5540, which also produces very high-quality photograph glossies, the deviation is subtle, and the devil is in the very fine details.

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

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

The quality of printed text isn't quite every bit impressive with the ET-2550. Letter forms were not as stiff a black as those printed past the Envy 5540, and the edges not quite as precipitous. That said, neither printer neared the razor-sharp text you'd expect from a light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation printer. Both models fabricated equally attractive prints of color graphics on plainly paper.

More: Best All-in-One Printers

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

Ink/Toner Toll and Yield

Well-nigh printers offer low up-forepart prices, with the costs of replacing ink adding upwards over time. It'due south quite the opposite with the ET-2550, which has a high initial price tag of $400, simply offers affordable ink in refill bottles. So how long will it take for you to save what you spent up front? Let's do some quick dorsum-of-the-napkin math to make a comparing to the $100 HP Envy 5540, using the page-yield specifications from Epson and HP.

Outset, let's assume y'all print a lot, and that every page is a color page with equal coverage of 5 percent per color (the ISO standard). At 500 pages a month (the recommended monthly page volume for the ET-2550), it would have almost five months to save the $300 extra y'all paid versus the Envy 5540.

Despite the price per page, the difference in purchase price means it will take quite a few prints earlier y'all recoup your investment in the ET-2550.

For this quick adding, I assumed use of high-yield cartridges in the Envy 5540, though I didn't include HP'southward ink-subscription plan, which offers additional savings. Costs per colour page using these specifications are fifteen.vi cents for the Envy 5540 and less than a cent (0.93 cents to be precise) for the ET-2550. To save $300, you'd need to print more than 2,000 pages. Cost per black-and-white page for the ET-2550 is simply 0.three cents versus half-dozen cents for the Envy 5540. If you printed 500 text pages a month, it would take 5,291 pages, or 10 and a one-half months, to recoup that $300. So, despite the dramatic difference in toll per page, the similarly dramatic difference in purchase price means it will take quite a few prints before you lot compensate your investment in the ET-2550.

Setup

If y'all've never filled an ink tank earlier, y'all're likely wondering how messy the process is. I plant it simple to open up the ink bottles and pour the ink into the ET-2550's 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 procedure.

Setting up the ET-2550 on my network was piece of cake. The menus offer a WPS way, in which pressing a button on my wireless router added the printer to my network.

Startup Time

The ET-2550 is fast to get-go up. The dwelling screen on LCD appeared at 6 seconds, which was significantly faster than on the Envy 5540, which took almost 12 seconds. The ET-2550 kicked out its first copy at xviii.vii seconds.

Software

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

More than: Best Photo Book - Photography Book Printing Services

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

Bottom Line

The ET-2550 offers a dramatic reduction in ink costs and produces first-class photo prints and scans. Serious photographers will love the sharpness and depth of the ET-2550's glossy photo prints — and given their heavy utilize of ink, stand to benefit the most from this model's unique, refillable ink tanks. Photograph print times are irksome, notwithstanding. And although the ET-2550 makes black-and-white copies chop-chop, its middle-of-the-road 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 World mag, CNET, Taproot, and Modify Activeness — plus Tom's Guide, of course — while his music has appeared in more than 260 TV show episodes for major networks such every bit NBC, Hulu, BBC America, and more. You can check out his work on Spotify.