Epson EcoTank ET-2750 review: Great value prints from a quality MFP

The Epson EcoTank ET-2750 is a great example of an ink tank MFP: a multifunction printer, copier and scanner that stores its ink in tanks.

These tanks can hold enough ink to print thousands of pages without running out and when they do run dry, they’re replenished from cheap plastic bottles instead of expensive, difficult-to-recycle cartridges, keeping the running costs minuscule in comparison to standard inkjet and laser printers.

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Epson EcoTank ET-2750 review: What do you get for the money?

The flip side is that, at £260, the Epson EcoTank ET-2750 is relatively expensive to buy and lacks a few core extras.

There’s no automatic document feeder, for instance, and paper is fed in from a fold-out 100-sheet capacity tray at the rear instead of a dedicated high-capacity tray at the bottom of the machine. This means if you want to use a different type of paper for a specific print job, you have to unload your stack of plain sheets and pop them back in again when you’ve finished.

The printer is relatively compact, however, at 375 x 347 x 187mm (HWD), and is capable of duplex printing. You can connect via USB, Wi-Fi and there’s even a slot for an SD memory card, which you can access from the printer’s small 1.5in colour display.

As for ink, that’s pretty generous. The Epson EcoTank ET-2750 comes with two bottles of black and a bottle each of cyan, magenta and yellow, which is enough to print 15,000 mono pages and 6,000 pages of colour. Prints are produced at resolutions up to 5,760 x 1,440dpi, and scans are made at 1,200 x 2,400dpi.

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Epson EcoTank ET-2750 review: Is it easy to use?

The most complicated thing about setting up the Epson EcoTank ET-2750 is that you have to fill its ink tanks before you plug it in and switch it on. It sounds scary but it’s a clean and simple process that’s almost impossible to get wrong.

Break open the seal on the bottle, open the printer lid and up-end the bottle onto the correct tank. You can’t put ink in the wrong tanks because Epson moulds a key shape into the neck of the bottle, so only the correct colour bottle will fit onto a particular tank. Once slotted into place, a couple of seconds pass, then the ink starts glugging into the printer.

As a point of reference, this process has had more thought and care applied to it than rival ink tanks systems. Refilling a Canon MegaTank printer, for example, involves double-checking that you have the correct bottle for the tank, because the bottles’ necks are identical, and you have to squeeze them to force out the ink.

Once that’s done, most of the printer’s operations can be carried out from the device you’re printing from. However, for those times when you need to control the printer directly – when making copies or using the SD memory card slot, for instance – there’s a 1.5in colour screen to help you explore the available functions.

Unfortunately, it isn’t a touchscreen, so you need to use the bank of buttons to the right to navigate through its options, using the arrow buttons to highlight options and the OK button to select them.

Epson EcoTank ET-2750 review: How fast is it and how much does it cost to run?

When it comes to speed, there’s one area where the Epson EcoTank ET-2750 excelled in our tests, and that’s the time it takes to produce its first mono print. We timed this at 10 seconds from the click of the Print button to the moment the print landed in the out tray, which is about as fast as it gets.

In the rest of the speed test results it sits around the average mark. It can reach 9.5ppm (pages per minute) when printing standard mono prints, accelerating to 14.5ppm when printing in draft mode. Colour prints are produced at 3ppm, unless they’re being printed on both sides, in which case it slips to 2.3 sides per minute. In a nutshell, it’s fast enough when printing the odd page but, if you need pages and pages of documents printing in a hurry, this isn’t ideal.

Scanning and copying speeds are also middling. Here, the Epson EcoTank ET-2750 produced a single-page mono copy in 15 seconds and a colour copy in 35 seconds. Scanning speed to a PC is also nothing to write home about, with a 300dpi A4 scan taking 24 seconds.

Print costs are this printer’s strengths, however, and even once you’ve ploughed through the 21,000 prints this model is capable of out of the box, refills are extraordinarily good value for money. This is exactly what we’d expect from an ink tank printer but its mono prints of 0.2p each, and colour cost of 0.4p per page are phenomenally reasonable.

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Epson EcoTank ET-2750 review: What’s print quality like?

Print quality is a game of two halves. The photo prints this printer produced were impressive. This was largely down to the Epson’s black and darker tones, which are rich and deep. Its black looks truly black, not just a very dark purple or green, which I’ve seen on photo prints from other ink tank models. All photos were printed with bright colours and sharp detail.

It doesn’t print photos as brilliantly as the best cartridge-based printers. The Canon Pixma TS8350 is able to produce light and dark skin tones with more subtlety, detail and contrast, for instance. However, it isn’t that far behind.

When it comes to printing regular documents, mono prints are also good, but it loses some of its richness when printing mixed colour and mono content on plain paper. It particularly struggled with our colour duplex test, clearly having to print with less ink to ensure the page was dry before it being pulled back into the printer. On the cheap paper I used for this test, the ink bled through to the other side.

The answer to this is not to skimp on paper quality. When you’re getting a colour print for just 0.4p, spending a bit more on decent paper would almost certainly still work out cheaper per page than printing from a cartridge printer that lays down bolder colour without drenching the paper.

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Epson EcoTank ET-2750 review: Should you buy it?

Office work that demands presentation-quality colour prints, as fast as possible, would be asking too much of the Epson EcoTank ET-2750. In this situation you might be better off with a laser printer, such as the HP LaserJet Pro M255dw or an office-specific inkjet like the HP OfficeJet 8022.

However, if you want a versatile printer that’s good enough for a home office, perfectly sufficient for school work, and also produces decent quality photos at a low, low cost per print, the ET-2750 is the perfect fit.