Epson EcoTank ET-8550 A3 Print/Scan/Copy Wi-Fi Photo Ink Tank Printer, With Up To 2 Years Worth Of Ink Included

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Epson also quotes yields in terms of 6 x 4in photos. A full set of colour inks will print 2,300 photos, which works out to 3.4p per print, based on the presumption that all the inks are used up at the same rate. Canon’s Pixma PRO-200 inks yield an average of 550 photos for a full set of inks, which works out to around 27p per print. The ET-8550’s prints might not be quite as good, but they’re a lot cheaper.

Epson ET-8550 printer review - Northlight Images Epson ET-8550 printer review - Northlight Images

The particular card here is a 285gsm etching paper from Fotospeed in the UK, which I’ve created a custom profile for. The built in scanner can be used as a basic copier onto plain paper. It has no document feed, but to be fair if I want document feeding I’ll buy a full time office printer. For myself, the ‘office functions’ of this printer are a distant second in my concerns compared with art/photo printing. The Epson EcoTank ET-8550 A3+ Colour Multifunction Inkjet Printer is an innovative and reliable printer that is ideal for home or office use. With a range of options including printing, scanning, photo printing, CD & DVD printing and copying, this multifunctional printer offers exceptional print quality, with convenient tools and increased connectivity features. Perfect for creatives, this printer also accepts a range of media types for photo or craft printing and it can print professional quality photos with up to 5,760 x 1,440 dpi print resolution. The combined average score was 7.9ppm—not necessarily slow for a photo printer in this genre, but as printers go in general, it’s not particularly fast. However, in this regard the ET-8550 handily beats the Pixma TS9520, which managed only 4.7ppm.

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It will probably be a difficult printer to find profiles for, too. No major paper manufacturer other than Epson is supplying any profiles yet… What might eventually arrive? I’d put at least some Red River papers in the “probably” category – they already have profiles for a few other EcoTank models and many other dye-based Epsons. Will they include the more interesting papers? Both Hahnemuhle and Moab are at least possibilities – they offer profiles for a few Epson dye inkjets, and this is one of the more photo- oriented models to come out in some time. Canson Infinity seems unlikely, since every Epson printer they support so far is a pigment model. It should be possible to make custom profiles, but that seems like a lot of effort for this type of printer. Profiling hardware is expensive, and it is somewhat difficult and time-consuming to use. Easier to use profiling hardware exists, but is several times the price of this printer. This is a printer that can fire the printing enthusiasm – sure, paper will cost and the inks will need filling up, but it’s easy to use. So, a Hahnemuhle 210gsm watercolour paper was in the ‘big gamut’ category, whilst the Fotospeed Platinum Cotton 305 was in the small gamut camp (and hence much better for B&W). For some colour images (such as the scanned watercolour) it worked well, but paper choice should partly be driven by what sorts of image you want to print. It’s something that is of more benefit if you plan on printing at higher quality settings and with lots of detail in your images. The printer worked just fine before it, but I always carry out such adjustments if offered, with any printer I test. Media handling From my limited (recent) experience of office printing, the printer doesn’t feel particularly fast (or slow), and if it’s home/office printing that you really want then this printer, with its emphasis on creative imaging is perhaps less likely what you are looking for.

EcoTank ET-8550 | Consumer | Inkjet Printers | Printers

Compare the graph with this one using the same paper, but the VFA setting. The flat curve is what I expect to see from pigment ink printers. It’s a wide format printer, which means it can take paper up to A3+ in size, and it has two paper trays and a rear feed, so you can effectively have three types of paper loaded and ready to print on, depending on what kind of project you’re working on. Last but certainly not least, Epson has built in a scanner and copier, making this a true multifunctional marvel. Dan Wells, "Shuttterbug" on the trail, is a landscape photographer, long-distance hiker and student in the Master of Divinity program at Harvard Divinity School. He lives in Cambridge, MA when not in wild places photographing and contemplating our connection to the natural world. Dan's images try to capture the spirit he finds in places where, in the worlds of the Wilderness Act of 1964, "Man himself is but a visitor". He has hiked 230 miles of Vermont's Long Trail and 450 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail with his cameras, as well as photographing in numerous National Parks, Seashores and Forests over the years - often in the offseason when few people think to be there. In the summer of 2020, Dan plans to hike a stretch of hundreds of miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, focusing on his own and others' spiritual connection to these special places, and making images that document these connections.

The LED is a very blue white and definitely not a light to make any judgements of print colour accuracy with. Smaller paper This pushes the file resolution well above what might be thought best for such prints. Now that in itself is not really a problem but I was printing the image on one of my card templates, which are 300 ppi, so I needed to scale the image. The sharpening of the scaling gives the resulting cards very good crisp detail, whilst still maintaining the watercolour look. The SD/HC/XC card slot and PictBridge port are conveniently placed at the front left of the printer. (Image credit: Epson) Epson EcoTank ET-8550: Performance Remember me? The famous old Stylus Pro 3880 isn’t a bad image quality comparison – more inks, but the ET-8550’s more modern inks and tiny droplets help compensate.

Epson EcoTank ET-8550 review | TechRadar

This also beats Canon’s G650 and G7050 A4 ink-tank printers and beats the speeds achieved by Epson’s four-colour ET-2750. Colour prints arrived fast, too, produced at 6.1ppm – three times faster than Canon’s six-colour G650.Once it’s set up, it’s mostly a simple printer to use. It defaults to a wi-fi connection, which is easy to set up – the big, high resolution screen really helps, after years of trying to set up wi-fi on printers with tiny screens. Both USB and Ethernet are also provided, along with a USB device port for a memory key and an SD card slot. I didn’t try connecting a card reader for a non-SD format to the device port, but it might well provide direct printing from CFExpress or XQD. Since it supports both Apple and Google versions of direct printing from phones, it seems to have just about every interface possibility known to photographers. No, where I’ve made full ICC profiles of both the papers, the results are obviously different even from the profiling targets.