EpsonEcoTank ET-2861 A4 Multifunction Wi-Fi Ink Tank Printer, With Up To 3 Years Of Ink Included , Black

This printer replaces an earlier Epson Eco Tank printer and I was first disappointed that the inks were not the same so had to buy a complete new set of inks and throw away the old inks. My last Epsom printer was a pain as it frequently jammed and picked up 2 pages at a time which this new printer has never done - so far.My old Epsom also had horizontal lines on pictures and only worked well on photo paper for pics. With this new printer I use BLUE SWAN A4 Matte Inkjet Photo Paper,100 Sheets,140 g/m², Double-Sided, and the results are phenomenal. The only problem I have with this printer is that it wont print 2 sided automatically, you have to load the sheets in one by one and after all these years of development you would think Epson, and all the rest, would have sorted that one out. If you look at the test results on Which, not one printer is great, just the more expensive are better. Overall, given its fault, the quality, if you find the right paper, and price on inks is great, but underneath that it really is a basic printer after all. All printers are the same. However, I do expect a bit more for my £250.

We decided to buy an ink tank printer as we'd already wasted far too much money on cartridges.This one was replacing a HP Envy 6032e.I didn't really consider going for a HP ink tank printer as I've had 4 HP WiFi printers over the years and all of them have suffered with WiFi issues (occasionally just refuse to print over WiFi and require driver re-installs and other time wasting fixes (which my HP accredited tech support Son has had to deal with).My Granddaughter has an Epson WF printer she uses for working from home and she told me it's been faultless and advised me to go with Epson.At the time of purchase the ET-2860 was £180 (annoyingly, 2 days after delivery there was a voucher for £10 off that price).Installation via USB is very easy, pretty much plug and play.Installation over WiFi on a Windows PC was a little bit of a faff but nothing majorly difficult.The PC was connected to the router via a physical network cable, while trying to install the printer the software kept saying it couldn't detect the printer.The suggestions to fix it were a bit sparse. As the PC also has WiFi, I decided to disconnect the network cable and try again with the PC connected via WiFi.Problem fixed, the software now detected the printer and installed it without any other issues.Once done, changing all the printer settings etc was no different to pretty much all other printers.Filling the ink tanks is quick and simple. The one thing to watch out for is the fact the attachments on all the bottles is the same so you can accidentally put the wrong colour inks in the tanks, just make sure you double check you're putting it in the right tank and you'll be fine.Print quality is pretty good, text and diagrams etc are sharp. Photo's are pretty good but it wouldn't match up to a printer aimed at high quality photo printing.I printed a photo on some 240gsm semi-glossy paper, the printer had no trouble with the papers weight (it's rated for up to 300gsm) and the printed image was rather good.Colours weren't quite a match for what was on the screen (not as vibrant) but that was more likely to do with my monitors colour settings. Even so, the photo still looked quite nice.I've no doubt some image editing would improve the colours of the printed photo.The only part of the photo that didn't look very good were scenes with blocks of dark gradients (like a large body of water on a dull day).It's didn't look bad and from from more than a foot away you probably wouldn't even notice.The scanner is OK, much like the scanner on any other printer these days. Easily good enough for copying documents and photo's with good accuracy.Like other scanners, set the dpi to the higher settings and it will take a quite while.After the printer was installed I was looking at the features etc, Epson have 2 different sections on their site for templates.I was surpised at how many they had and how varied they were. All sorts of craft projects, birthday/etc cards, photo frames, wrapping papers (obviously for small items with this printer seeing as it's A4).I'm going to have lots of fun with that as I do like making my own cards and things.If HP have anything like that they don't go out of their way to make it easy to find.Overall I'm very happy with the printer. The only things it lacks which you would expect on printers in this price range is a paper tray (which I prefer to rear tray feeding) and automatic duplex.I'm not taking away any stars for those as I knew that before buying.I did consider the ET-2850 as it does have auto-duplex but it was £70 more and I don't need it enough to warrant the the extra cost (the 2850 also still has rear loading paper, if it also had a proper tray I may have bought it - hope you're listening Epson, many people prefer a tray).My £70 HP 6032e that this replaced had both auto-duplex and a proper paper tray, the only other real different between the HP and this Epson is the ink takes so it is a large expense for a printer that effectively has less features.Over time the Epson will of course cost less as replacing the inks is massively cheaper (I did have a HP Instant Ink subsription but paying per page rather than how much ink you use only works out worthwhile if you're covering the pages in ink, which I don't often do - especially as we print a lot of A6 postage labels).Knowing the future ink cost savings I think this is a worthwhile investment.My Son wants to do sublimation printer and apparenty Epson EcoTank printers are the best value for that too.

Came in it's secure box, had to give the delivery person a password which was emailed to me in advance of delivery, which is a nice secure feature, first time having to do that.It was easy to set up. Everything was in the box. The screen is small but it's surprisingly easy to use anyway, that was my initial concern. You can set up via your smartphone by scanning the QR code. However, halfway through my setup, while waiting for it to do its thing, my phone went into screensaver mode and I think that halted the entire process, it didn't progress and I couldn't move on via the phone app. BUT, just finish it via the screen, it's so easy. I mentioned that in case anyone else had the same thing and didn't know what to do. The phone app is just another method of setup, it's just as easy to use the actual printer screen.Filling the ink was easy, no mess. Each ink bottle has its only nogging shape that slots into its respective tank, and you can sit it there without holding it.Once it was set up it has to print a test page which was perfectly fine. And then it's good to go. People have mentioned the cheap feel of the loading tray at the back, but tbh this isn't any different from past printers. It's the same plastic as my old Brother printer which I'm replacing. It does it's job and that's good enough for me.I bought this as an artist wanting to print my own art and Etsy products and stickers etc. I did a lot of research before deciding on this model, and I'm not disappointed. However it has had some issues I had to get help for from Epson, but they have been very helpful.Such as, the scanner itself. This scanner relies on your network, but it mine seems really iffy with being visible on my home network. My computer can find my old Brother printer with an entire floor between them. This one is sat right next to my computer and more often than not so far it can't pick up the machine when I want to use the scanner (via the scan program). It finds it if I want to print, (I print mainly from Photoshop), but for some reason it's not there when I want to activate the scanner. I've even used my Cricut cable to plug it into the computer but still not very good. Of the 5 times I've tried to scan from the Epson scan program, only 2 did it find the scanner. Now, my ISP is having issues, our network has been weak many days in the past fortnight, but it can still PRINT from my computer/network.I have since contacted Epson to find out why, I will update this when I have a solution. It might just be user error (however even scanning from the printer screen itself doesn't work). And I have only tried this several times. I wanted to mention this in any case.The print quality, though, is well worth it. I went through a lot of Youtube videos to find out the best colour profile in Photoshop for my work, and the results are stunning. I compared my prints next to ones I had ordered from print companies, and my colour and quality looked even better.It prints beautifully on matt, satin and glossy paper (my tests so far), though if you do print on glossy do some research on Youtube because you can get different qualities depending on the settings you use in your programs (i.e. set Photoshop paper settings for matt paper but putting glossy paper through gives a different quality than assigning glossy settings).Also I have experienced the odd roller imprint of some prints. Not all of them, weirdly, just some. And the odd spot of ink where it shouldn't be, always on the edges. I did read about this in other reviews though so it's not a surprise. Seems to be just on the thicker papers.Despite the scanner issues I personally have experienced, I'm very glad I bought this printer. For the price it's exceptionally good and if you use it for your small business like mine I'm sure it will pay for itself.EDIT on the 6th November 2024: The only sure way for my scanner to work is to use the cable and plug it into the computer. No issues that way. It just doesn't like the network for using the scanner, and I've no idea why. I use my Cricut Maker cable so I already had that.Note for when printing full colour A4s. I had an issue where the printer would pause during printing and then after a few minutes just spit out an unfinished page. It was frustrating, until I found a youtube video suggesting reasons why this might be. For me, it was the printer heads overheating/getting too warm after printing one or two A4s back to back. I now wait at least 30 seconds after each A4 print and I haven't had it happen again. It's a tiny inconvenience, but I hope it helps someone else with this issue.