Epson EcoTank ET-8550 Printer Review: A very cost-effective, high-quality photo printer

 

 

Most of the time, printing your photos at home is fun and rewarding, yet moderately costly. However, Epson's EcoTank printers aim to reduce the costliness by including high-efficiency, refillable ink tanks. I recently purchased an Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 printer to be able to make prints more affordably, and I've been extremely impressed with the printer.

Let's get something out of the way right off the bat. If you're looking for the absolute best in print quality, then you should look past the ET-8550 and head straight to the Epson SureColor pro-level printers. They're fantastic. I own two high-end Epson printers, including the 17-inch-format Epson SureColor P800. You can read my in-depth review of that fantastic printer here. There's a major downside to printers like that, however. A full set of ink is $550, which is about half of what the printer cost brand new when it was released. I'm not a heavy-duty user, but I've gone through three sets of ink and a few maintenance cartridge replacements. The costs add up fast.

The Epson ET-8550 is $700, ships with a full set of ink tanks, and a full replacement set is under $100. Epson says you can expect to save up to 80% on ink. After using the ET-8550 for a few months, I believe it. I don't anticipate needing any new ink for a while, and I've already made quite a few prints in a range of sizes, including about 50 11x14 prints.

 

Epson ET-8550

This review has a lot of ground to cover, but it won't be as in-depth as my SureColor P800 review since the ET-8550 isn't a pro-level printer. My primary focus will be features and performance relative to amateur photographers who want to print their photos at home without breaking the bank or sacrificing overall print quality.

Note: Believe me, I know that showing resized digital photos of real-life prints is not the ideal way to illustrate what a printer is capable of. However, my subjective analysis (hopefully) still holds water.

Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 key features & specifications

• Prints up to 13 x 19 borderless
• Uses 6-color refillable ink tanks (black, photo black, cyan, magenta, yellow and gray)
• Uses Claria ET photographic dye inks
• Prints up to 5,760 x 1,440 dpi resolution
• Can print borderless 4 x 6 photo in as little as 15 seconds
• Supports mobile and wireless printing, including Apple AirPrint, Android printing and Amazon Alexa
• Can photocopy and scan (full color, 4,800 dpi scanner)
• Has multiple media loading slots and can support thicker fine art paper (up to 1.3mm thick)
• Full-color 4.3-inch touchscreen
• Has an SD card slot
• Compatible with macOS and Windows
• Storage dimensions (W x D x H): 523 x 379 x 169mm (20.6 x 14.9 x 6.7 in.)
• Printing dimensions (W x D x H): 523 x 758 x 430mm (20.6 x 29.8 x 16.9 in.)
• Weighs 11.1 kg (24.5 lbs)
• $799 list price, can be found for $699

Design and usability: A nice-looking printer that's simple to set up and easy to use

The Epson ET-8550 is an unassuming-looking printer. It's mostly white with a black accent around its touchscreen and ink tank reservoir. It looks nice – it's sleek and modern. It's also not that large, considering it makes up to 13" x 19" prints. It's 523mm (20.6 in.) wide, which fits on many desks and small tables. When printing, including an extended rear feed for larger or thicker paper, it's 758mm (29.8 in.) deep. In storage, its depth is about half that.

Much of your interaction with the printer is done through its 4.3" tilting touchscreen, which can close flush with the rest of the printer's face. The touchscreen works quite well and is responsive. The menu design is also nice. The printer was easy to set up, and the app features illustrated step-by-step guides for initialization and using different paper types and sizes. It's a breeze. There's also an accompanying smartphone app that walks you through the setup process and allows you to make prints wirelessly. I primarily worked with the printer through Adobe Photoshop using a wired USB connection, but wireless printing from my phone worked well too.

 

The ET-8550's tilting touchscreen is large and easy to use.

As for the setup process, the hardest part was finding and removing all the tape and bits of packing materials. Once that was done, it was just a matter of following along with the smartphone app and getting the printer connected to a wireless network, which was easy. Once it's connected, it's time to fill the ink tanks. The printer ships with a full set of refills, which come in plastic bottles. The bottles have specific keys for each ink tank, so you can't accidentally put the wrong ink in any tank. They also only slot it one way – the correct way. Once they're slotted, you tip them upside down, and the ink automatically flows into the printer's tanks. Once it's full, the flow stops automatically. It's a nifty system that makes topping off tanks easy.

After the tanks are full, the printer must initialize. The process takes about 10 minutes and will visibly reduce the ink tanks by about a quarter. Don't worry, though, the ink doesn't just vanish into thin air. The printer uses a bit of ink and a single sheet of paper for a requisite head alignment and nozzle check, but not much.

 

Smaller paper, like 4x6, 5x7 and 8x10, is loaded in the front of the printer. With the included guides, it's easy to line up your media of choice.

Once the printer is set up, regular use is quite straightforward. However, there are a few quirks and mild annoyances. The front paper feeds, which are for smaller or letter-sized paper, can sometimes be pushed too far into the printer, requiring some finesse to pull them back out. Sometimes the printer starts to feed paper before the tray is fully seated, which can cause a loud sound when the mechanical parts inside rub against each other.

The upright rear paper feed, used for larger paper, works perfectly well. However, a second rear paper feed requires you to take a piece off the printer's rear to feed paper straight into the back. You'll need ample space to feed the paper into the back of the printer. It's a bit of a pain. I think someone could get used to it, but as a new user, it's not a great experience. When inserting any paper, the touchscreen has available on-screen instructions. However, the instructions aren't always clear. In any event, I happily printed on large paper sizes using the standard upright rear paper feed, so the irksome second rear feed didn't affect my usage.

 

 

Print Quality

There's no doubt that Epson's professional SureColor printers deliver outstanding print quality with their large, archival ink sets and high-resolution, precise nozzles. However, as much as I like my SureColor P800 printer, I don't always require that level of performance. I often don't need archival quality or sharpness that stands up to super close inspection. Further, it's expensive to run a printer like that, so I have long wanted a more affordable option.

Ultimately, the EcoTank ET-8550 doesn't quite match the print quality of my P800. Still, it comes impressively close, and most people, myself included in some cases, would struggle to pick prints from each printer apart from a normal viewing distance. Not only are prints pretty sharp, but the ET-8550 also produces prints with nice vibrant colors and smooth tonal transitions. With extreme colors, like bright green or dark purple, the printer fared a bit less well, but real-world images still looked great.

 

 

When printing in Adobe Photoshop using the appropriate printer and paper drivers, it was easy to make pleasing prints that nearly perfectly matched my display. My laptop display isn't calibrated, although I do edit most of my images on a calibrated external monitor. However, even so, the prints looked pretty good next to my laptop screen. If you've printed photos at home, you've likely dealt with frustrations getting prints to match what you see on the screen, but the ET-8550 did well without any adjustments. It's critical to use the correct printer driver and paper profiles, though, especially when printing colorful images or photos with expansive dynamic range.

I will briefly put on my "perfectionist cap" to comment further on colors from the ET-8550. They look good. But, and the size of the "but" here depends upon how tightly-fitted your own perfectionist cap is, the colors aren't strictly accurate. Fortunately, the issue isn't that greens don't look green or anything like that, but rather, that the saturation of any given color isn't quite accurate. The ET-8550 seems to make colors a bit too punchy. You see this same sort of issue with nearly every digital camera. People like bright colors because they attract attention and generally look how we remember things looking. However, there is such a thing as too saturated. For me, at my most critical, the ET-8550 is on the wrong side of saturation. However, color accuracy is still okay and prints look good, which is ultimately what matters most for a printer in this price range.

 

This print looks good. However, if I wanted to get into the weeds, the skin tone is slightly too warm, overly saturated and a bit bright relative to the original file.

Black and white photos are typically a bit of a challenge for most printers. It's not unusual to get a bit of a color cast, sometimes prints come out somewhat yellow or a bit blue, or they lack contrast. However, this printer did a great job with Epson's black-and-white printing mode enabled – available in the printer dialog in Photoshop. Blacks were inky, whites were white, and the variable gray tones were accurate. I didn't have any issues losing detail in the shadows or highlights that I expected to be visible, except in one specific instance when I had to brighten up my digital file by +0.25 to achieve the results I wanted. That was a uniquely challenging shot, however.

As for speed, the printer is pretty quick. An 11x14 print at highest quality takes about five minutes from start to finish. That's not bad. You can print quite a bit faster at lesser quality, but I don't want to sacrifice quality when making a print that size. On the other hand, 4x6 prints are a bit less demanding, and the ET-8550 can print a low-quality 4x6 on glossy paper in well under 30 seconds. A quick note about printing. The printer has an output tray that automatically comes out when you start a print job. For some reason, you can't push the output tray back when you're done. You must instead tap a button on the touchscreen, and the printer will retract the tray, allowing you to close the front of the printer. It's a bit odd because with the output tray in the extended position, it's hard to load additional paper in the front paper trays. It's a small annoyance, but annoying nonetheless.

 

Overall, the ET-8550 produces outstanding print quality. For many users, myself included, most of the time, the print quality is more than good enough.

Efficiency and Cost

It's great that the ET-8550 makes nice prints. However, what sets the printer apart from something like Epson's SureColor printers is the efficiency of the EcoTank printer. For starters, the printer ships with a full set of ink. The six ink bottles that ship with the printer are good for up to 2,300 4x6 prints. Epson says the ink should last about two years, so gone are the days of constantly getting new ink cartridges, which are costly and pretty terrible for the environment.

Let's suppose you want to make 8x10 prints. If you order a single 8x10 print from a lab on glossy, semi-gloss, or luster paper – typical photo paper – it'll cost $3-4 per print. 100 sheets of US Letter size Epson glossy photo paper costs about $0.22 per sheet. The ink cost of those 100 8x10 prints with the EcoTank ET-8550 is roughly half that per print. It's easy to see the significant savings you can rack up in short order by printing at home on the EcoTank ET-8550. The savings become more apparent if you print at 11x14 or 13x19 sizes.

 

The ET-8550 ships with full bottles of ink. When you do need to refill the ink tanks, a full set is around $90.

You need to print quite a bit to achieve these savings, though, because the ET-8550 has a fairly high upfront cost of $700-800, depending upon ongoing sales and the retailer. It'll take quite a few prints to recoup your cost.

Summary

The Epson EcoTank ET-8550 is a great option for photographers who want to print at home. As long as you won't regularly need to print 16x20, 16x24, or larger, the ET-8550 is an economical choice. The upfront cost is reasonably high, but the cost of ink is insanely low. You pay just $90 for a full set of refill bottles, and that's good for more than 2,000 4x6 prints. Further, the printer comes with full ink bottles, which is great. Not all printers ship with a full set of ink.

Importantly, you don't sacrifice much by way of print quality relative to Epson's professional printers. While I could nitpick certain color tones or the overall sharpness, the ET-8550's prints look great at normal viewing distances.

 

 

For situations when I'm not making large prints or require archival ink, I'm happy to print on Epson Ultra Premium Luster paper using the ET-8550.

What I like most:

• Pretty easy to set up with the accompanying mobile app
• Supports wireless printing
• Includes a scanner
• Useful touchscreen and good menu design
• Very good print quality
• Gray ink helps with black-and-white printing plus overall detail
• Extremely affordable ink

What I dislike:

• Rear straight paper feed is obtuse, although it's not necessary in most cases
• Paper feed instructions on the printer aren't always clear
• Some trays require face-down paper while others require face-up paper, which can be confusing at first
• Colors can be a bit too saturated
• Fairly expensive

 

 

The Epson EcoTank ET-8550 is a great option for:

• Amateur and enthusiast photographers who want to print their photos at home
• Photographers who hate spending hundreds of dollars on new ink every few months
• Photographers who make many small to medium-sized prints

The printer isn't a great choice for:

• Photographers who need to make prints larger than 13x19
• People who don't print often, since the printer is pretty costly
• People who sell their work and require the best print quality and archival materials

Overall, while the list of "dislikes" is almost as long as the list of "likes," I really like the Epson EcoTank ET-8550. It does almost everything well, and it does so with extreme efficiency. If you do a lot of printing, you can save a lot of money by doing it yourself at home with the ET-8550. The print quality is impressive, too. I highly recommend the ET-8550 to most photographers.

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