Epson EcoTank ET-4850

AVOID. MULTIPLE SOFTWARE ISSUES – I have owned this machine for a year and it is nothing but trouble. 16 Aug 2022: Error in printing. Wouldn't print because several issues like wrong paper size were selected even though I set it to A4 on both the laptop and printer. Epson told me to delete and re-add 'epson net print port.' I followed the steps to no avail. 7 Jan 2023: Piece at… Read more

feeder tray fell out during photocopying. Could not scan using the feeder tray. 2 May 2023: Continued error in printing. Printer keeps restarting print jobs so I will end up with 4 or 5 sets of half-printed documents.The printer wifi appears not to be connecting. Emailed Epson Customer Service. 11 July 2023: Another complaint to Epson for help with printing. In one of these incidents, I had to print a 20 page document 3 times! It stopped at pg 13 so I tried to print the rest of it. It stopped at pg 16 so I tried to print pg 17 to 20. It was an excruciating day.

I honestly believe this machine has inherent software issue. Like other reviewers, I appear to have wifi connectivity issues and need to re set up so many times.

Now, epson is claiming the warranty is out and then, it's claiming it's user error. It's rubbish.

I owned a WF 3650 for four years with no problem. Happy as a lark. Something is awfully wrong with this ET-4850.

Very good all-round home or office printer – Replaced 10-year-old Canon MX870 all in one printer that finally died. What to replace it with? There are so many printers on the market it can be difficult choice and a lot are good enough for the home office – scanning and printing documents is our prime function, photos occasionally so if you don’t need a dedicated photo printer an all-rounder… Read more

makes sense – We narrowed choice down to the Epson ET4850 and so far, no regrets.

There is a choice for a lower cost printer that uses ink cartridges (our previous experience with the Canon) but whilst the capital cost is low the operating cost for ink cartridge printer is very high! I did some comparative checks on cartridge versus ink tank printers and the differences are considerable – at the rate we print documents, black and white and colour plus photos we would probably spend in the order of $600 over a 2-year period for cartridges.

The tanks on the Epson hold a lot of ink which is supplied with the printer first time purchase. At the current rate of printing, we estimate that the ink will last more than 2 years which means even though we paid $598 for the printer we will not be spending any money on ink for the next 2 years and thereafter the ink cost will be about 5 times less than using cartridges.

Epson state that “with an integrated high capacity ink tank system, the Epson Eco Tank ET-4850 comes with enough ink in the box to print up to 14,000 pages in black / 5,200 pages in colour without worrying about ongoing ink replacement and costs - Replacement bottles hold enough ink for a massive 7,500 pages in black / 6,000 pages in colour” – cannot verify these claims so early into the use, and it may depend on the settings as to actual performance, but it is clear that the ink tanks are way in front of cartridges. If you are a very low volume user, then maybe a lower cost printer is a reasonable choice but for medium to high volume users’ printers like this Epson are way ahead.

Set up out of the box is not difficult – it’s designed to work on the network, and you can connect your tablets, phone and remote devices in easily. Have read some reviewers saying it only took about 15 minutes to set up – that wasn’t our experience – by the time it loaded everything, downloaded and updated drivers and software and the time taken to register the warranty online, it was closer to an hour, but once everything settled down it was up and running. The printer comes with software for scanning and producing photographs etc. and have found this all to be good. It’s a little different the way it operates from the Canon but not difficult work out – there are far too many settings to highlight but there is not much you can’t do with the printer settings for the results you are looking for.

The printer footprint is good (38cm W x 34cm D x 23cm H) and it has a 50mm x 40mm touch screen – the graphics on the screen are adequate without being brilliant. There is a 30-page document feeder on top of the printer (for auto 2-sided document printing) and a front loading 250-page document drawer (this is very good) – the document drawer also serves as the tray for photos printing – there is 1 tray for paper and documents (have found this easy to manage). Epson says that the “Eco Tank ET-4850 is powered by Precision Core® Heat-Free Technology which uses a revolutionary high-density print chip that can generate up to 40 million precise dots per second with high accuracy, producing professional-quality output at fast speeds” – I have tested the font pitch sizes for Arial and Times New Roman for 6, 8, 10 and 12 points for each font style and they are very good, more than acceptable – Calibri font 11 points also produces very pleasing printed documents.

Compared to my original Canon the print speeds are very good @ 15.5 iso ppm for black and 8.5 iso ppm for colour. Maximum print resolution is 4,800 x 1,200 dpi iso. It takes no more than 5-6 seconds from start to print a page from cold start. The speeds were comparable with similar rated printers in its class.

Copy and scan functions work well. Copy speeds, 11 iso ppm black and 5.5 iso ppm colour – max copy size A4 – 1 sided to 2-sided reduction and enlargement (24-400%) Scanner is borderless, flatbed with ADF capacity of 30 sheets – optical resolution up to 2,400 dpi, hardware resolution 1,200 x 2,400 dpi – max resolution interpolated 9,600 dpi colour bit depth 48-bit colour input (ability of the scanner software to "fill-in" spaces between scanned dots – most printers offer this) – can also scan to PC & Cloud. I have used the scanner a number of times – running black and white standard scanning up to 600 dpi is quite fast, 1,200 dpi takes a minute or so, but the results are very good, and 600 dpi is good for scanning receipts and the like – the software utility that comes with the printer is very good to use (once you work it out which is not too difficult)

Have used the printer to print out quite a few photos for an anniversary – found that the photo printing is not quite as user friendly as my original Canon printer, but the quality of output is very good without being outstanding, but this is a 4 tank (BCMY) printer and not a 6-tank printer with the addition of red and grey ink tanks so for a std. 4 colour printer its very good. We didn’t buy it as a dedicated photo printer, it’s a good all-rounder It’s a little bit frustrating to set up the photo printing initially but there is some reasonably good software provided to help with the process and once you master it, it's not bad. Glossy photo paper produces the best results we have found so far, although was pleasantly surprised at some A4 photos printed on plain paper – the result was actually very good, with good colour and detail.

Have no regrets with buying this printer and look forward to many years of service – it’s a very good all-round Home and small office printer and is designed to handle a wide range of functions very well – it has a small footprint on the desk and is not obtrusive, fits in well. It prints out the pages fairly quickly, more than good enough for our use and if I had a small complaint, the noise level, whilst not a deal breaker is a little higher than what I expected.

I wanted to give this 4.5 stars but it has to be 4 or 5 stars. I will go with 4 stars for now and will revise my review after we give it a more thorough workout and consideration. The reason for no 5 stars at this stage is the noise level of the printer. The noise is not a deal breaker, but it is still there which was a bit of a surprise. Pros: • Well-built printer – seems to be good quality (even though a lot of plastic) • Mega ink tanks a big bonus – way ahead of cartridges • Useful lcd screen and easy enough to master the navigating after a couple of tries • Very good quality printing – tested it down to font 6 points, various styles, very good • Good for printing photos (on glossy paper and surprisingly plain paper) • Connects easily enough to the network for printing with PC, phones and tablets • Software for utilities is good • Warranty is good – online registration gets it out to 2 years • Print speeds are good for home use (and small office) Cons: • Noisier than I expected • Flatbed scan speed on higher resolution a little slow (but still very good results) Fairly high purchase cost, but expect to offset with significantly reduced ink cost.

Could Be Better – I was looking for another printer because I decided I wanted to stop paying for high priced inks. In the end I finished with 3 megatank printers a Canon G660 a Epson 3800 and the Epson ET- 4850 . Now I have two Canon printers, a Cheapie 9160 and my photo printer 8760. Before that I owned a Canon 9500 ,A Canon Pro 100 ,a HP, and an Epson 1270 . … Read more

My first call was to Canon ,and after 2 days I got a reply .sorry sir we don't sell that printer and could you please make sure you give us the correct model number. Well, I was outraged, I sent a number of replies with links to their own web page and to two reviews of the printer. So, that was in the dust bin, how could I buy another Canon when their own employees don't even know they sell it . Ok, the 3800 had everything I wanted bar a few things but the 4850 was featured so I hunted down a price and ended up with only a $32.00 difference between the two so it was easy, I chose the 4850.

I did say in an old review that I would never touch an Epson printer again because at the time they locked you into using their expensive inks ,but oh, how times change.

Now, onwards, the 4850 had a touch screen where as the 3800 was only an LCD.

It also had a 30 pages document holder for scanning and a fax which I will never use. Setting up was easy 3 computers one laptop and 2 desktops went without a hitch and I put the printer on the network

The Smartphone was even easier using the Epson app on the Android, and if you have an Iphone you need to do nothing as the in house app works like a gem. Apple® AirPrint® , Mopria®

I used standard versus high to print a document and you can see the difference in the photo I provided. The detail and colourare higher but it suffers in speed and is very slow using the high setting. Scanning was painless ,operating from my computer or standing over the machine it was quick enough and the results were pretty good.

Duplex printing works very well and will save you a lot of paper.

The drivers on this product don't give you much control over adjusting the colours for printing and most of the settings are choose this or choose that.

Printing photos was another story. I am pretty sure this machine suffers because it is only 4 colours with results not matching my Canon and leaving a hazy magenta look over the top. I printed the same photo 8 times using different setting, 2 different Canon papers, 2 different printer profiles which I found, improved results marginally and increasing the darkness of the print rendered a slightly better result as well. Still though, it was no match for the 6 Ink Canon and even my cheap 9160 beat it outright. My only thought was to buy some Epson paper and give that a go.

Even though reviewers say you can print with different brand papers , you can, but in my experience unless you have the paper profiles available or you can build your own then you will never achieve brilliant results. I supplied a second photo comparison, I picked the best shot I had .

Photographing a photograph is not a good idea so I scanned them in. It's still not a good idea as neither resemble the photo. oh well it's the best I can do.

Note : I did find some printer settings that were buried away under : more options/colour correction/custom/advanced. I tested various setting out but eventually switched off colour control and opted for a Epson R8590 premium semi gloss profile with an adjustment made to lower the magenta and red .This gave me the best results on the Canon paper but I will be trying the Epson paper when it arrives and I suspect judging from previous experience with the manufacturers paper it will not require the magenta adjustment.

Epson Premium Semi Gloss Photo Paper 251gm/m2

After installing the paper I made about 12 prints testing the proflies and different settings. As suspected the magenta cast disappeared and I found the best results were achieved by letting the printer driver control the printing and setting colour control to automatic.

Results were very similar to those achieved on my Canon 8760.

In my opinion you are best using Epson photo papers on this machine ,but for me I will probably just use my 8760 for photos because I still have a ton of Canon paper.

To any one interested I do use CS5 but print and use Qimage Ultra for printing and colour adjustment,which is not an expensive program but is pretty sophisticated .

The Epson printing app will allow you to make some adjustments so stick to Epson papers .

All I can say is the Epson ET-4850 is a very nice work horse and for most people it will do nicely, throw in the cheap ink and the $580 plus price tag is worth it. But The 6 tank will cost you nearly $1,000 a bit pricey and for that money it would be better spent on a photo printer if that is what you intend to do. Epson also give you an extra 1 year warranty and a $40.00 voucher with this deal at present. Photo results are average, and most would not see any difference unless, like me, they had another product to compare it too. With costs rising every day a megatank printer, where the inks will last 2 or 3 years and a refill will cost around $60.00 makes a lot of sense for home .

I did notice in one of the reviews comments regarding printer updating. You don't have to do this from the printer screen, you do it from the software you download onto your computer or tablet. It tells you it has an update, you can ignore it or install it .

You just click install and away it goes takes a minute and the printer always works fine after the update. You have that option with a scan , you put your document in to be scanned and you just scan from your computer and the scan appears on your computer, where, you can save or print . My only problem I found with scanning was multiple documents, they go in a slot on the top and unfortunately there were some lop sided copying and an occasional jamb.