Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5170

Excellent printer, average scanner. Good connectivity, easy to use – I bought this printer to replace my 15 year old Canon inkjet which I had previously converted to a continuous ink style printer using a popular aftermarket kit. Ultimately with age the heads were beginning to go and I was spending more time trying to get it to print than printing so it was definintely time for an upgrade. After looking into the… Read more

different CISS style printers I kept coming back to this particular Epson printer for the following reasons: - Double sided printing - Scanner with document loader for 15 pages - Wifi to be up to date and on the home network. - Lots of printing capacity - thousands of pages before refill - reasonable sized paper tray - reasonable photo prints. - great value when looking at total cost of printer and ink with connectivity abilities

set up - very easy, just follow the instructions and install the software from the web - nice an light for easy positioning - being wifi, you can put it anywhere there is a powerpoint - There is a network port if you would prefer a ethernet cable connection - filling the ink tanks is very well executed - no ink spills anywhere. Nice easy to see ink guages.

Printing - Print quality is excellent - fast, crisp and clear. - Even when doing double sided printing it is fast. - Can print straight from mobile phone - Paired with our wifi easily. - All existing devices were able to print without having to do any elaborate workarounds (joys of contemporary printer) - Haven't had any issues with printer jamming, though it's brand new so that is to be expected.

Scanning The scanner is only ok. The flatbed is good but the doc feeder is pretty poor in my opinion. It doesn't do double sided feeder scanning and it only can manage 15 pages in the feeder (I knew that before purchase so wasn't disappointed with that). No big deal with either of those limitations. What I was a bit surprised by is the quality of the scan from the document feeder. That is a pretty poor/low resolution and the pages jam or get scanned crooked easily unless the pages being scanned are nice and crisp condition with no dog eared corners (in a dream world perhaps). I've have found that I generally end up having to rescan the pages using the flatbed scanner, 1 page at a time. The flatbed for one-by-one scans means the resolution is reasonable. Certainly usable quality. The bundled scanning software is a bit iffy as well with 2 separate apps installed - Epson scan 2 & Epson Smart scan. I usually have to fire both up, one by one to work out which one I want to use. It's not all bad as you can load a page in the printer and then easily scan it using the app on your phone, ready for emailing or whatever.

Durability: Too early to tell but I have no reason to think it won't last several years based on other epson printer experience. I'll update my review should things go wrong in the future.

Conclusion Very happy with it as a printer. Top marks. Good quality crisp prints, fast, does a reasonable quality photo print straight from the phone. Very cost effective inks $100 for thousands of pages in colour and black and white. It's got great connectivity, and reasonable build quality for the price point.

Just don't buy this printer expecting a super great scanner. It's ok/good enough for home use/occasional use scanning - ie print out a form, fill it out and scan them type stuff it handles ok. But isn't ok for high volume document scanning or very high quality document scans in an office environment. For that role you'll need something else.

Good print quality. Scanner and ADF have issues. Expensive for what it is – Print quality is good. It is easily one of the best I have seen in an inkjet printer. The scanner is okay but nothing special. The scanner driver has some inconsistencies; the Windows OS scanner interface leaves a lot to be desired. My previous printers used to spend 90% of the time cleaning and preparing themselves for a print, and 10%… Read more

printing – very frustrating. This printer is quiet and it starts only when it is asked to print, and then it stops.

EcoTank system seems great, but the ink usage is quite substantial. I do not see this lasting 2 years (even with the second bottle of black ink supplied in a box and occasional printing).

The maintenance box could be a potential problem down the road - availability is my concern. The printer will not print once the little chip (SIM card-sized PCB) is told by a printer that it should be replaced.

Build quality leaves a lot to be desired; it is flimsy.

The WiFi card inside does not support the 5GHz band.... so the printer will work only with 2.4Ghz access points.

The scanner feeder does not support duplex scanning. This is by far the biggest minus. The only multifunction device that supports this functionality is their top of the line $1.2k printer in the Pro range. I'll leave this to others to think about and judge for themselves. Also, if you decide to use the ADF to feed the documents to be scanned, the result will have streaks/lines along the full height of the document…. which renders ADF unusable. The documents will also jam in ADF if not aligned absolutely perfectly – do not use the ADF to scan those originals/certificates.

This brings us to the price. There is no doubt that Epson has taken into consideration the fact that we consumers will save on the cost of cartridge replacements; hence the fact that what should be a $200 dollar printer with a cartridge system, costs close to $700 with the EcoTank system. Ink is still expensive ($120 to replace all 4 bottles); the cost of the maintenance box needs also to be taken into consideration ($20).

This printer (ET-5170) seems like a half-baked product with a few small and a couple of serious issues, which should not be the case at $700.

The printer comes with 2 years warranty; I left the original box in the garage. It honestly does not feel like a product that will last 2 years... even with minimal usage.