Epson EcoTank ET-14100 review

Printing in color, especially on A3+ paper, was always the fastest way to burn through your ink budget, but the cartridge-free Epson EcoTank ET-14100 promises full color prints with a knockout 90% cost saving. Vying to be one of the best small business printers, this print-only inkjet is aimed at the small office where its low-profile form-factor makes most of the best A3 printers we’ve tested look decidedly clumsy. In this pared back design, there’s no paper drawer, no touchscreen display and no auto duplex mode, but any office or home worker who needs to produce quality color printouts on large format paper should read this review. 

Epson EcoTank ET-14100: Design & build

For an A3 office printer, the Epson EcoTank ET-14100 looks quite stylish in its black and grey livery. It’s certainly a vast improvement on the clunky ET-14000, which housed its five ink reservoirs in a compartment that bulged out of the side. The new model has a double-sized tank for black, instead of two separate ones and the four tanks are now seamlessly integrated. And to keep things sleek and minimal, there’s no paper drawer at the front, just the rear paper in-tray, no USB Host port, no Ethernet port and no LCD. This is a simple print-only device with no scanner bed or ADF, so there’s no real need for a touchscreen interface. Instead, there are just four buttons on the front panel and one port at the rear for a USB data cable. By stripping back to the bare essentials, you’re left with a low and lightweight printer with a flat top that’s ideal for inspecting your printed documents.  

Epson EcoTank ET-14100: Features & specifications

The main attraction of the Epson EcoTank ET-14100 is its ability to print on any size paper up to A3+ or Ledger and, of course, its cartridge-free credentials. Swapping cartridges for bottled ink makes a saving of 90% and ensures this Epson will trounce any inkjet or laser when it comes to cost per color page. You also get plenty of inbox ink. A standard 104 EcoTank bottle contains 65ml and yields 4,500 black and white pages. There two bottles of BK and one each of CMY, yielding a total of 9,000 black and 7,500 color pages. This being the first installation, some of that ink is needed to prime the pipes between the tanks and the printheads so those numbers drop to 6,400 and 5,600, but that’s still a lot of printing before you have to refill. It’s this high capacity for ink that makes this the best printer for an office with a high-volume workload. 

Epson describes the ET-14100 as ‘feature-rich’ in the brochure, but I’d call it decidedly feature-lite. There’s the inbuilt wi-fi and a rear tray that can hold 100 sheets of paper and that’s it. There’s no LCD, no NFC, no front USB or Ethernet ports and no front paper tray. It can’t even auto duplex, meaning you have to turn the paper over yourself to print the other side. However, I do appreciate this printer’s focus on quality high-volume printing. With 400 black nozzles and 128 color, tiny dye ink droplets measuring 3.3pl (picoliter) are used to make up images with a resolution of 4,800 x 1,200. That’s sharp enough for a good photo. It prints quickly too, with a claimed print speed of 30ppm (pages per minute) for simplex black and white A4 prints.

Epson EcoTank ET-14100: Setup & operation

The Epson EcoTank ET-14100 comes with clear printed quick start instructions, but it’s much easier to download the companion app for iOS/Android and follow those step-by-step prompts instead. The Epson Smart Panel app helps you join your new printer with your existing Wi-Fi and also tells you when and how to fill the ink tanks. With key-lock ink bottles, it’s impossible to fill the wrong tank. We’ve tested a number of the best ink tank printers, and we can say that this system is so well designed, it’s hard to spill any ink. The black ink tank is larger than the others and takes two standard 65ml bottles to fill. 

The lack of a touchscreen display, which has become a common feature among office printers, didn’t make the Epson EcoTank ET-14100 any harder to operate. There’s no need to set the paper type at the printer because this can be done on the computer and you can check the remaining ink levels via the app. The lack of a front paper tray proved more inconvenient, because it means you can’t load up a stack of fresh paper and forget about it. The exposed rear tray isn’t a great place to store paper and it can only hold up to 100 sheets. 

Epson EcoTank ET-14100: Performance

The Epson EcoTank ET-14100 passed all of our tests and printed quite quickly in some cases too. In draft mode this printer claims to turn out simplex monochrome pages at a staggering 30ppm, while the FPOT (first print out time) is given as a fairly prompt 8 seconds. However, our speed test revealed a figure closer to 15ppm and I wouldn’t describe this as a particularly fast printer. Photo printing on coated paper takes much longer (around 8ppm), but I won’t mark it down for that because the image quality is well worth waiting for.

Black text on plain white paper looks acceptable. Each character is imprinted well enough, but the black dye-based ink seems to soak into the paper leaving softer edges than you would get with a pigment based black. Office printers more often use soluble dye only for the CMY inks and pigment for BK because ink droplets in suspension tend to give you bolder and more durable text. In other words, the Epson EcoTank ET-14100 is okay at churning monochrome documents in simplex mode, but that’s not its strong point.

Color documents, and especially photographs, are where the Epson EcoTank ET-14100 excels. Any of the best inkjet printers can print a photo on photo paper, but for anyone searching for the best photo printers, this Epson manages a significantly sharper image than most. The small ink droplet size and high resolution combined with the four dye-based inks manage to produce pleasingly lifelike photos on glossy paper. The EcoTank 104 inks are not necessarily the brightest colors we’ve seen, but the fine detail achieved here ensures a superior print quality to rival A3 inkjets such as the Brother MFC-J6540DW.    

Epson EcoTank ET-14100: Final verdict

There’s a lot to like about this office-oriented A3 inkjet. Firstly, the minimal design means it will fit into a small workspace, while handling large format paper with ease. Secondly, it’s an EcoTank which means cheap ink. Thirdly, it prints great quality color photos. What it’s not so good at is running out monochrome text documents because the black dye ink doesn’t look as sharp as printers that use a pigment black.

It’s also a little too light on features. I don’t need a display, or a front USB port, or an Ethernet port, but the absence of a front-loading paper tray is an inconvenience. With only a 100-sheet rear tray, you have to keep refilling, and switching paper stock, while the lack of an auto-duplex mode is definitely a saving too far. All of these issues are addressed in one of the best Epson printers out there - the EcoTank ET-18100, so I would recommend taking a look at that six-color printer before pulling the trigger on this one. Alternatively, if you already have a decent auto-duplexing A4 printer in the office, then the Epson EcoTank ET-14100 would make an excellent addition.