Epson EcoTank ET-4950 review: a money-stretching, all-in-one, bottle-fed printer, complete with fax

Epson has been a major player in inkjet printers for as long as I can remember, building a solid reputation for quality and performance over the years, all around the world. Like other manufacturers, however, Epson has been plagued by criticism concerning the price of ink cartridges, which can leave a bitter taste in terms of running costs. The answer comes in the shape of ‘EcoTank’ printers, with bottled ink refills saving up to 95 per cent in the total cost of ownership, over the years.

For a busy home office environment or as a printer for the whole family, Epson reckons the ink supplied with this printer straight off the shelf should keep you going for up to three years. Indeed, it’s supplied with a set of full-capacity ink bottles, plus an extra bottle of black ink for twice as much text printing. Crunching the numbers as well as a mighty stack of paper along the way, the supplied ink should be sufficient for printing up to 15,100 pages of mono text and 5,500 color documents. I hate to think how many cartridges I’d have to buy and how much they’d cost, to rack up those kinds of numbers. This Epson certainly aims to be one of the best all-in-one printers for the home office and for hybrid working.

Epson EcoTank ET-4950: Specifications

Epson EcoTank ET-4950: Price

You can buy cartridge-based inkjet printers for a lot less than this one, which sells for $500 / £460 / AU$729. But the savings tend to be short-lived. Typically, the ‘setup cartridges’ supplied with the printer don’t last very much longer than the setup procedure itself. From then on, you’re into buying expensive cartridges, often on an alarmingly frequent basis. While this EcoTank printer is relatively pricey up-front, the flip side is that running costs are massively cheaper if you need to print documents more than just occasionally. Ultimately, the ET-4950 can save you a big pot of money in the long term.

Epson EcoTank ET-4950: Design & Handling

Inks are a fundamental design factor for any inkjet printer. This one runs on a pigment-based black ink and dye-based cyan, magenta and yellow inks. The sum of the parts is geared to enabling crisp, durable black text on plain paper, along with convincing color performance. Color printing on glossy photo paper comes with the advantage that only the dye-based inks are employed, so you’re guaranteed a smooth finish with uniform reflectivity. The downside is the absence of an additional dye-based black cartridge, which can degrade photo quality.

Unlike many printers that come with low-capacity ‘setup cartridges’, this EcoTank printer is supplied with a complete set of full-sized bottles, to keep you going for longer. It’ll actually be a lot longer, as you get not one but two 127ml bottles of pigment black ink, as well as regular 70ml bottles of dye-based cyan, magenta and yellow inks. And if you’re thinking that bottles of ink bring the risk of spillage, rest assured that the bottles have a gravity-fed delivery system with shut-off valves to avoid any mess. They also have individually and differently keyed tops, to stop you accidentally pouring ink into the wrong tank.

The printer driver can give you updates on ink levels within the tanks but for a more hands-on, or rather eyes-on approach, the tanks have inspection windows at the front. This makes it easy to keep track of ink levels with just a quick peek.

As a final word on filling the tanks, access to them is gained by a cover that hinges forward. The cover also happens to have a pleasant blue-illuminated ring around the top, which gives a visual indication of when the printer is in use. After hinging the cover forward, you get access to the tanks.

After filling each of the tanks, flip-over stoppers fasten securely and are hidden away beneath the cover. The initial setup procedure uses some ink to prime the print heads, but you should still have enough left over for 15,100 mono pages and 5,500 color document pages. That’s a lot of pages! Going forward, replacement bottles should last for 8,500 pages of black text and 6,500 color documents. The cost works out to $24.99 / £15.49 / AU$39.98 per bottle of black ink or $75.95 / £39.49 / AU$99.95 for a full set of all four ink bottles. The net results is that running costs tend to be massively cheaper than for cartridge-based printers.

The installation procedure is quick and easy, taking less than half an hour from start to finish. The final part of the process is to print a test page which also acts as a print head alignment page. In some cases, print head alignment is a chore, based on manually entering different numbers into various boxes. In this case, it’s all automatic and quickly finished.

After you place the calibration page onto the scanning platen, the printer simply scans the page and carries out the alignment procedure all by itself, in just a few moments. This ensures that the print heads are optimally aligned for the sharpest printing results. For more typical scanning jobs, you’re probably more likely to use the auto document feeder.

When folded out for use, as shown below, the ADF can accommodate up to 30 sheets of paper, ideal for scanning, copying or faxing multi-page documents. It also stretches the maximum size of originals that can be scanned, from A4 or 8.5x11.7" to 8.5x14”. The ADF is definitely a useful feature to have and doesn’t add much to the overall height when in use.

Although the Epson is predominantly a document printer, I’d still like to have the luxury of putting plain paper in an internal feeding cassette, and photo paper or other specialist paper like letterheaded paper in a top feeder or secondary tray. The printer gets half way there with a convenient space-saving 250-sheet internal paper feed cassette, but there’s no secondary cassette nor an upright feeder at the rear.

I’m a lot happier about the output tray than the single input cassette. It’s fully motorized and extends automatically when you start a print job. You also get the option to automatically retract the output tray when switching off the printer, so the front of the printer is flush from top to bottom.

Following the recent trend for touchscreens in almost any type of gadget, the printer features a 6.1cm / 2.4" color touchscreen on its front panel. It’s certainly not massive but, to my mind and eye, it’s big enough to do the job. It’s also quite easy and intuitive in use. And to make it easier to see and to operate, the front panel hinges up so that you can choose the angle you find most convenient.

An auto duplex unit is built into the back of the printer, enabling automatic double-sided printing without the chore of manually flipping paper over and feeding it back into the printer. It worked reliably throughout my testing but if you should suffer a paper jam, it’s easy to unclip the unit at the back and clear any stuck paper.

There’s a variety of sockets and ports built into the rear of the printer. These include USB, LAN and fax, along with the mains socket. The printer also has built-in Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi direct, which many of us find more ideal for printing from multiple computers or laptops around the home. You can also print and scan from smart devices, taking advantage of the Epson Smart Panel app. There’s support for Apple AirPrint, Mopria Print Service and Mopria Scan, but no card slot nor a USB socket for scanning to and printing from a memory stick or memory card.

Epson EcoTank ET-4950: Performance

The ET-4950 has a decent turn of speed, outputting mono text pages at 18ppm and color pages at 9ppm in standard quality mode. The ‘first page printout’ speed can be notoriously slower but I was impressed during my tests. Printing a single mono text page took just 5 seconds, while a page of mono text and color graphics took 12 seconds, both in standard quality mode.

Mono text on plain paper is crisp and robust, as I’d expect from a pigment-based black ink, and fine detail as well as the ‘small print’ are clearly rendered. There’s also good vibrancy for color graphics, which literally look good on paper. Solid blocks of color and graduated tints are both reproduced very nicely.

On Epson’s spec sheet and supporting online literature, I haven’t seen any claims about print speeds for glossy photo printing, nor how many photo prints you can expect from a set of ink bottles. That’s fair enough, as the ET-4950 is predominantly designed as a document printer. Even so, the dye-based cyan, magenta and yellow inks make a decent stab at glossy photo prints. The dye-based inks are fully absorbed beneath the outer glossy layer of photo paper, resulting in a smooth and uniform finish with no ‘bronzing’ or areas of uneven reflectivity. However, the pigment black ink isn’t used for glossy photo output and the lack of an additional dye-based black ink limits the gamut and tonal range, so dark areas in photos can look a little insipid.

Photo printing is also relatively slow. I set about making 7x5-inch borderless photo prints on glossy paper and they took me 1m 30s or 2m 55s each, in standard and high quality settings respectively. Stepping up to full A4 borderless photos in standard or high quality mode, prints took 2m 45s or 5m 15s each. There was very little to choose between high quality and standard quality modes in terms of photographic fidelity.

I’ve become well used to Epson printer driver software being intuitive and easy to use over the years, and the drivers for this model are no exception. That’s a performance boost in my books, cutting down the time it takes to adjust settings. The gallery below shows the three main screens for the Windows printer driver, include the Maintenance section with options like nozzle checks and print head cleaning.

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Performance can be put on hold if you need to send your printer away to be serviced. This has often been the case in the past when maintenance cartridges have become full to capacity with excess ink. Like most modern competitors, the ET-4950 has a user-replaceable maintenance cartridge, which is quick and easy to change if it becomes full. The genuine Epson replacement is inexpensive to buy, at $10.99 / £10.49 / AU$15.99.

Epson EcoTank ET-4950: Verdict

I really like the stamina of the Epson EcoTank ET-4950 printer. I find the relatively continuous and arduous task of searching for, ordering and replacing ink cartridges to be a time-wasting and money-wasting chore. The ink tanks are sufficiently large in this printer that I can simply fill them with the supplied ink and forget about them for months on end. I like the speed and quality for mono and color document printing on plain paper, and that the ‘all-in-one’ features stretch to direct faxing as well as just printing, scanning and copying. The auto document feeder for the scanner, auto duplex unit and motorized output tray are further plus points, and so is the intuitive color touchscreen. I’m less impressed by the lack of a secondary paper input tray and glossy photo printing could be better and faster. All in all though, this Epson printer is a very good fit for the busy home office and for productive families taking on anything from general paperwork to homework assignments.

Alternatives

The Canon MAXIFY GX4020 / GX4050 / GX4060 (USA / Europe / Australia) is a similar ‘MegaTank’ printer that also includes an internal paper feed cassette but adds a secondary upright rear feeder. Like the Epson, it has a color touchscreen and a slightly higher-capacity 35-sheet auto document feeder for its scanner.

The Epson EcoTank ET-8500 is a fair bit pricier but a more accomplished all-rounder. It’s great for both mono/color documents and for photo printing, thanks to the inclusion of pigment black ink plus dye-based CMYK and grey inks, thus featuring six inks in all. It also has SD and USB slots for direct, standalone printing, and a large color touchscreen.