Epson WorkForce ET-4550 EcoTank Wireless Color All-in-One Supertank Printer with Scanner, Copier, Fax, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Tablet and Smartphone (iPad, iPhone, Android) Printing, Easily Refillable Ink Tanks

I've printed only regular color documents on regular paper, not photos on glossy or matte paper, so I can't tell any major difference than any other printers. But, so far I love the automatic duplex printing and wireless connection. Since I print out a lot of documents, I'm really looking forward to saving a lot on ink cartridges as well because I'd been spending about $150 per year, not to mention this year I'm about to start printing out even A LOT more, so this printer was released at a perfect timing! I do wonder how the inks will be in the tanks in 2 years if they don't get spent. But, maybe for those who print only 100 hundred pages or so in a year, this may not be necessary. <Ink Tanks> I was initially slightly concerned about the initial setup and filling up the ink tanks after reading some of the negative reviews here. But, it was easy and not messy. In the photo you can see the paper towel that I used to clean 1) the tips of all the ink bottles, 2) the mouths of the ink tanks, and 3) the gloves. It's really not messy if you're careful. I didn't spill any ink so the paper towels on the bottom of the printer stayed clean. Also, all the bottles still have some ink left after filling the tanks up to the lines. And, it comes with small bonus bottles. <Setting Up> The initial setup was easy (Macbook Pro OS 10.10.5). It takes 20 minutes to charge the inks, which is automatic after the initial setup. Setting up the wifi connection for it was as easy as setting it up for a laptop, too. There's not much to it. Over all, I'm very happy with the product and price. My last printer was HP C4480 so this is quite an upgrade for me. Before the purchase when I was a little concerned after reading the negative reviews, I was still confident that the entire setup would be easy because it's made by a highly trusted brand, and also because it's 2015, not 2005; These days I don't run into many user-unfriendly products that run on a Mac.

This is the second one I have purchased recently, so I clearly liked the first one. The second one is just the same. What is stunning is the ink capacity (duh) which completely changes the printing experience. I was so tired of the HP run around where seemingly every day one of the many colors was "low" and the printer would hold up and make me hit a bunch of buttons--in between huge delays--only to refuse to print because the recently-purchased genuine HP ink was out of date. Buy more ink at ridiculous prices. And we don't print very much anymore! This Epson printer is night and day better in terms of ink capacity. Setup was simple. The print quality is excellent. The only reason I have not given it five stars is for the user interface or lack thereof. It is very lame. Very old school where it will not do anything if you change paper type and you do not hit a lot of up and down arrows. It could be way simpler if they had someone design the user interface that had some experience. The only other quibble is the document feeder. It tends to drag the document in at an angle and then mangle it if you are not very, very careful. This is not a deal killer, however. But I do not hesitate to recommend this printer. Super ink capacity. Excellent print quality. A far superior solution to the old "buy more HP ink" model for not that much more money. UPDATE: I have now had this printer for two years. The printer works OK. The ink supply is the only redeeming feature of this printer. The fact that they call this a "scanner" is fraudulent. This is the world's worst scanner. It jams. It mis feeds. It tells me to power it down. I can maybe get one page through it out of three. The software is beyond brain dead. They should remove all mention of this being a scanner. This is one awful product as a result and I am surprised that Epson has not refunded the money to all those who have purchased this so called "scanner".

So far so good! The first one I ordered didn't print yellow - so I had to send it back. But I defect on a new product is not uncommon, and I don't blame Epson. The second one works great. Setup was easy and I think the print time is fine. Compared to my old HP, which took 60 seconds just to power back from sleep and "get ready" to print, this is much faster. It powers on, feeds paper and just starts printing. Much better. I stopped buying HP printers when they started monitoring my ink usage. The printer started to say the ink was low when it wasn't, and I couldn't bypass the errors. Then it started NOT printing because it thought the ink was low. Well, a few hundred dollars worth of ink later, I was still getting all kinds of errors. This is so much easier, and Epson doesn't care how much ink you have left, or who you buy it from. It just prints. And the amount of ink in this beast will last me a long time. I need to be able to print daily unfortunately, and this has been working perfectly! UPDATE: It's been almost a year of printing daily, and I have not had to replace the ink! Also - I feel like the printer does a pretty good job. Quality is low by default, but you can change it. For what I print - low quality is fine most of the time. When I need it nicer, I just change a setting. I've even printed a photo onto photo paper, and it's pretty good!

There is no doubt this printer is great. It bangs out full page color and BW with a minimal ink hit - load up those reservoirs and forget about changing the ink for a LONG time. The colors are better than I expected since my previous printer was a 6 cartridge Epson Expression photo printer. Photos match the digital source very accurately (to my eye) when printing on plain paper, far better than you would expect from just 3 color inks. My wife is a lifelong photographer with a good eye and she approves it as a solid amateur replacement for the old Photo Printer. She still sends her serious stuff out for professional print. Black and White pages print out fast and the text resolution is laser quality IMO. Very professional output here. My current issues: in January of 2015 Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) announced that more than 1 Billion iOS devices have been sold and some 700 million of them are still actively being used. The vast majority of these iOS devices are AirPrint enabled which means they can print from literally any screen within most any APP, not just Apple's apps like Mail, Safari, Notes, Numbers, Pages etc - AirPrint is readily available to all third party apps. So why does Epson (in mid to late 2015) release a printer that is not AirPrint compliant? In order to print from an iOS device you must do one of the following: 1) download their Epson Connect app onto your iPhone and use it exclusively to FIRST find the image or document on your phone or cloud service, and THEN send it to the printer. Epson Connect is not a simple printer driver that you install once which then runs behind the scenes allowing you to print out email from the Mail app or photos from the Photos app (etc) whenever Apple iOS gives you the option to 'print' from within the app. 2) Epson Remote Print allows you to setup an email address thru epson's website that links directly to your printer. Anything you send to this free custom email address of yours will automatically start printing. This is pretty cool as you can literally be anywhere in the world and send stuff to your printer, however, your print will always be in email format, with Sender, Subject ETC at the title and the print will not be in the documents native format. This isn't that bad of an issue, but something to consider when you send work drafts to your Epson Remote email for printing. But here is the worst part for me: As of 9/27/2015 The Epson Workforce ET-4550 (and I am assuming all the other ET series) is not recognized as Bonjour published printers onto a wireless network. What this means is that your Mac running any version of OS X (10.7 to Yosemite) will not recognize the printer on your network when you go to 'Printers and Scanners' under System Prefs. The Fax portion shows up, and allows you to make a profile, but you can't print to the Fax. So as of right now the only way I can print a document from either our iOS devices or our Mac OS computers is by using Epson Connect or Epson Remote Print. I hope this changes very soon as I just spent $500 for a printer my entire family needs to use for leisure, school and business, and as it stands right now, the printer is a clear hindrance to our daily workflows. Which is sad because the printing speed, ink efficiency and print quality are off the charts...

So, I have spent the month since I purchased this printer to test for any lasting issues. The experience so far has me very satisfied. Setup was a bit of a process. The reviews are accurate. It will take around 20 minutes to complete. Some say they spilled ink no matter how careful they were. If you have a steady hand, you'll have no issue pouring ink into this printer. The only ink that escaped the reservoirs was a tiny drop of magenta that landed on my finger. It connects quickly and easily to my WIFI. All of my devices can print to it effortlessly, without the need for extra software. The printer hasn't had a single hiccup or computational error. I have read some reviews where double-sided printing has failed epically. Fortunately this has yet to occur... Hopefully never. Included in the box is a plastic bag with instructions for how to transport this printer. There is a risk of spilling ink during transportation, but so long is you don't flip the thing over or drive like a maniac with this thing in the back of your car, you'll be fine. Here are my complaints: - The ink reservoirs stick out from the side of the printer, as seen in the image provided by Amazon. It might bother some, since it takes up extra space and might not fit where you wish it would. - The little screen this thing comes with is pretty insufficient, especially for the price. It only displays one line at a time, which can be a bit aggravating, but it is not often that you'll have to be adjusting its settings. - As for the out-of-box settings, the printer neither prints double-sided nor from last page to first page by default. This, however, is a problem that is probably unique to my situation. There might be settings that I have yet to find to set defaults according to my liking. - Also true to other reviewers is that it prints rather slowly for what you'd expect to get at such a high price. It gets the job done at a reasonable rate, but if you're used to faster printing speeds, then you'll definitely notice the difference. There are great reviews where people have calculated the exact number of pages per minute for various types of documents versus other printers. Verdict: It is easy to see that Epson did all that they could to minimize the costs of manufacturing this printer to help offset their lost ink profits. The tiny black and white display and cheap plastic hardware are a few examples of the many cut-backs made on such an expensive printer. The subpar quality of the hardware, however, is balanced with the benefits of paying less for a higher quantity of ink at an infrequent rate, which is what attracted me. Epson did a great job creating a product that just barely justifies the price. It is true that for $500 one could get a printer of much, much higher quality, but the price of ink increases dramatically; the whole point of buying this printer is to pay less for ink. The logic in my purchase was that I'd rather pay a large sum up front for the luxury of cheaper installments towards ink purchases.

Updated after 2 months use. Quick Recap 2.25 Stars. I rounded up to 3 for the review. Pros: - Lots of ink for a cheap price. - It did print on cardstock. Cons: - Cheap feel. - WiFi was annoying to set up (but maybe I was just having an off day). - Document feeder does not handle anything but thin paper. - Speed: It is slooooowwwww printing and even slooooooooooooooooower scanning. Full Review The last Epson I owned was back in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s. It was a great printer but it was dot matrix. I replaced that with a Brother laser printer. And finally, for the past 15 or 20 years I have used HP printers exclusively. I am replacing an HP Officejet Pro 8500 with this Epson WF-4550. I finally got sick of being held hostage by HP for high cost ink. I have always liked the quality of prints from the HP printers but have tired of the ridiculous ink prices. Thus, the 4550 with the refillable ink reservoirs is a chance to try something else. - Overall Quality. o The printer is much smaller than the HP beast. It is nice to have something a bit smaller.  Yes, the ink wells jut out to the side but where else are you going to put the ink.  It is much smaller than my HP and fits on my stand correctly instead of sideways. o The “feel” of the Epson is “cheaper”. The plastic seems thinner. - The paper tray seems flimsy. Overall, the HP “feels” like it is constructed of much better materials. - The paper holder must have been designed by a first year student who did not realize that one should not design the paper exit platform to interfere with loading and unloading the paper tray. The paper tray does not slide in easily and gets stuck. If you want to load one or two pieces of card stock and then slide the tray back in, it is not done very easily. Very poor design. It seems like it will break after a little regular use. - The scanning process takes forever. The scanner is virtually useless. If you do a lot of scanning you will not like this machine. My HP 6550 scanned much better. o The Epson turds do not supply the USB cord required to hardwire the printer. What a bunch of cheapskates. o The little LCD window is very quaint. Sort of like going back to a town that has not changed in 200 years. It is a little (I do mean little) black and white screen that you operate by pressing buttons. This is not at all as nice as my HP printer which had a relatively large colored touchscreen that was really easy to use. As you can tell, I am not a fan of moving around little screens using little buttons with arrows on them. - Setup of printer and ink was easy and straightforward. o I have read “horror” stories of people who have ink all over the place when trying to set up the reservoir ink machines. I assume that these are people who cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. o Yes, I got a spot of ink on my thumb opening the black ink. I note that I was able to confine the spot to my thumb. It did not precipitate an ink meltdown whereby my office was destroyed and arrayed in a multi-colored mess. In other words, filling the reservoirs with ink is easy and relatively mess free. - Setup of a hardwire connection. o Easy. Follow the directions. o Load the software. o Do NOT plug in your computer until you are told to do so. - Setup of WiFi was a pain in the neck. o The computers would not recognize the printer. o Finally, all computers did recognize the printer. o And, I downloaded an Epson app and printed from a tablet. However, the first attempt generated an error. The second (exactly the same) attempt provided me with a print. o So, let’s consider that maybe I was having a bad day, was not following instructions well, and WiFi setup could have been much easier. - Printing. o Printer setup takes a long time. It takes 20 minutes to charge the ink system. o I print a lot of financial graphs in color and have printed thousands of these on my HP. The colors have always been relatively nice and easy to read. o The Epson print of the same type graph is really washed out using the default Standard setting. o I had to change the setting to Standard Vivid to get a comparable print to the HP. o I grabbed a couple of really colorful screenshots and printed them. They looked okay. I will still get my photos printed by a service rather than a home printer. - Print Speed. o It seems slower than the HP. A lot slower. o A review of specifications show that it is much slower. o I would not use this printer for printing documents with a large page count unless I was in a bind. It certainly does not seem like an office “WorkForce” output. - Scanning. o The scanner apparently worked. O The scanner worked very slowly. - Copying. I used the document feeder. o I made a copy and it was fine. o I made copies of four pages and the copies were fine. o I made another copy using a slightly thicker piece of paper and the feeder could not handle it. It jammed, it stuck, it stretched the copy.  When I tried to simply open the feeder to clear the jam the machine still said it was jammed. I had to shut it off and then turn it back on to use the machine. o It was sloooooowwwwww. - Recap. o Hopefully, it will cost much less to print what I print and over the next 5 years I will save a lot of money on ink. o Once connected the WiFi printing seems to work well. o The printer still prints great from my tablet or laptop using WiFi. o Since I generally only print a few pages at a time the printer should work well for me. o If you want something with blinding speed you need to look elsewhere. - Ratings. o Quality of components: 2 stars. The plastic seems much cheaper than my HP. o Paper tray and platform: 1 stars. Too hard to load since the platform interferes with the tray. Additionally, the tray gets stuck when loading due to too much play. o Setup: 3 stars. Too long to charge ink. WiFi took too long to start working correctly. o Print speed: 1 star. Very slow. o Print quality: 3 stars. It appears one needs to change the print output to Standard Vivid every time I make a print. This adds a level of annoyance. Maybe there is a way to keep it set on Standard Vivid but I did not yet find it. o Scan speed: 1 star. Very slow. o Overall Average: 1.83 stars. I rounded up to 2 stars. - Final – if you need speed for prints or scanning – choose a different printer.

I got this printer in spite of some who gave it a poor rating. I use this printer weekly but must admit I don't print hundreds of pages per month. I ma very technical and thus I find that I found it very easy to set up and start scanning and printing on the network. i can print from anywhere in the house as I have a pretty strong network. I love the fact that you can view the ink status just by looking at the individual tanks. the ink that came with printer should last a person about a year if they print less than 200 pages per month. in fact I believe if you print more it would still last a very long time. As for the print quality, this where I waiver a bit. when you first install the printer it works great and the print quality is fantastic, however if you let the print sit for too long then the ink probably dries a bit and then the color is a bit off. you see what HP and other manufacturers is the printer is designed to clean the hear every time you start it up to avoid print clogging up the print head. this waste a lot of ink and thus you need to buy ink more often. HP and others make their money from ink NOT printers. Its why they can sell a printer that cost them $100 to manufacturer for $70. because in 45 days or less you will pay $75.00 for more ink that you will not get a quoted number of printed pages from it. but the printer printers wonderfully every time for this reason. For this Epson, though I am a bit unhappy with the quality of the color prints since I have not printed anything in color for 3 weeks, ( i print mostly black) the savings cost is worth it for me. If you are a graphic designer, then this may work for you if you print on a regular basis and keep the tanks stired regularly. Update---printer now has a everlasting paper jam. Epson support is terrible and will ask you to restart the printer. hmmm where have I heard that before???? they sent a replacement that was bad. i have to send this to a land fill and I hate that. Epson....you disapointed me deeply for your poor quality and poor non us customer support. I am not blaming india as I have developers working for me in india are are great. Epson just picked the wrong group of people.

Epson WorkForce ET-4550 EcoTank Wireless Color All-in-One Supertank Printer with Scanner, Copier, Fax, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Tablet and Smartphone (iPad, iPhone, Android) Printing, Easily Refillable Ink Tanks Being that I am the business partner for a local well known artist, I do a lot of printing for advertising, inserts for art prints and printing photos of his original art. When I saw the Epson ET-4550 I was a little afraid of ordering it because of some of the reviews. I loved the fact that you could print a lot of things under the ink tank system. I decided to bite the bullet and order it. I've only had it for a couple of days and I cannot believe how easy it was to setup and load the ink tanks. I just took my time setting it up and believe it or not, didn't spill any of the ink. Even registered it all in the same process. Since the setup, I have printed our company brochures, inserts for art prints and also some prints. The brochures were printed on 110 index premium stock card and art prints on semi-gloss photo paper. I printed the brochures top page first then the back page separately. I was used to changing the card stock out this way with my older Epson WF-7510 printer. I never used the double-sided feature with card stock paper because it would always grab more than 1 sheet at a time. It might be a little more work but I feel it's worth it to get the extra copies with the ET-4550. I have added a photo of a print with my older WF-7510 compared to my new ET-4550 and I believe the quality is much better. So far I am very pleased with the ET-4550 and hope to get a lot of printing out of this printer.

I find the colors are hazy not crisp and sharp. Looks like a haze over the picture even on the highest setting. Didn't realize it was only an 8.5 x 22" model--would be nice to have legal size. No single sheet feed--sure miss that feature. Would have thought every printer would have this feature by now. It is easy to use and prints quite rapidly.

NEVER BUY EPSON PRODUCTS!!! I used to have a Crapson printer a couple of decades ago and it was a piece of garbage. In 2015, decided to give them a second chance and got this steaming pile of horse manure. Within a few months, the color nozzles were completely useless, after less than a dozen printouts. Ink refill with bottles is messy and antiquated. Now, the black nozzle is all gummed up and no amount of repeating the Cleaning procedure will work (printed less than a thousand pages). Updated the driver this morning.... It won't even print anymore, even though WI-FI has been reconfigured and is working. ENOUGH! I am dumping it out the balcony for a 23 floor swan-dive...

I sent it back without even opening the box. Between the time I ordered it and the time I received it, I discovered that the duplex printing is manual not automatic. That was a deal killer. The description of the printer is misleading, at best. The eco-tanks are a great idea but .....

Very Slow & the print quality is worse then my $79 regular Epson. The only saving grace is the ink Tank system which lasts for a long time. I use it as my back up printer at the office for basic and non urgent print jobs.

The machine didn't even last a year it is not printing properly anymore. Looked everywhere online, how to clean it, fix it, ink flushing, the machine is now worst than even. Big disappointment about the equipment. You see many nice reviews about the product, but I loved it for the first couples month. $600 should last you longer than 6 months. I always buy on Amazon and give great review everything that deserves a great review. As a business owner, quality is a priority. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with this printer. Thanks