Hands on: I tried out the Epson EcoTank ET-2830 - see how this cheap inkjet holds up

If Epson’s EcoTank ET-2830 was a normal inkjet we’d be bemoaning its high price and taking aim at a relatively basic specification. We’ll come back to the latter, but the first is explained by this MFP’s refillable ink tanks. The ET-2830 arrives with about 6,000 pages’ worth of bottled ink – enough to see out a year or two of light use in the home. It’s better value out of the box than a comparable entry-level, cartridge-based device.

And entry-level the ET-2830 is. It’s a three-in-one, able to print, scan and copy, yet there’s no display, no USB port and no memory card slot. Instead, you get a few buttons and LEDs, and a reasonably appealing and uncluttered design. It offers just a single rear paper feed, and a basic scanner with no ADF. The printer can’t flip over pages for double-sided prints, although the driver will help you do it manually.

The ET-2830 arrives with blue tape holding down every conceivable flap. Remove that and it’s time to flip open its ink tanks and empty the supplied black and color inks into the relevant nozzle – they’re physically keyed to prevent a disastrous misfuelling. This is usually the bit where we gripe about waiting for the one-off ink priming to complete, but Epson’s new Smart Panel app lets you join the MFP to a wireless network and get on with installing software while you wait. We found its verbosity annoying, but it worked perfectly and turned out to be a time-saver overall.

Once set up, this MFP offers no real surprises. Despite its basic nature, it will happily get on with regular household or micro-office duties, leaving printed pages in a neat stack. As you might expect, it’s not especially fast, managing only 12.3ppm on our 25-page black text test. However, with the print quality dropped to draft it reached 17.2ppm – significantly more than Epson’s stated 15ppm.

Cheaper inkjets often make a meal of our challenging 24-page colour graphics test, but the ET-2830 chugged along at a steady 4.5ppm – more competitive than it sounds. It wasn’t even that slow when printing larger photos, needing about three minutes for each 10 x 8in shot printed onto A4 paper. Unfortunately, it only offers borderless prints on 10 x 15cm paper, on which it took a beard-lengthening 14 minutes to deliver six prints. Color photocopies provided another opportunity to grow facial hair, with a single copy needing 35 seconds. At least mono copies, at 14 seconds each, were relatively brisk.

The ET-2850’s scanner didn’t hang about at lower resolutions. It completed a preview in 12 seconds, and in the same timeframe could capture an A4 document at 150dpi. At 300dpi, the same job took 22 seconds. Things got slower at middling resolutions, with the scanner needing 37 seconds to capture a 10 x 15cm photo at 600dpi. However, scan speeds remained competitive at 1,200dpi, with the same document needing just less than a minute.

Delightfully, there’s nothing especially entry-level about the quality of this MFP’s prints, scans or copies. Draft text was quite faint, but Normal quality produced crisp and dark results. Colour graphics weren’t the boldest we’ve seen, but they were free of banding, and comfortably good enough for home and internal business use. Photocopies faithfully reproduced the originals – although colour copies were a touch less saturated.

This MFP’s photo prints were a highlight of our tests, combining surprisingly crisp details with vivid colors and realistic skin tones. Only our black and white photo presented a challenge, with the ET-2830 adding a slight green tint and failing to preserve the darkest shade details. We were also very impressed with its scan quality, which combined excellent color accuracy with a wide dynamic range, making the most of office documents and photographs.

The EcoTank ET-2830 may be basic, but it’s not unduly slow, and it does everything well. Yes, it’s missing duplex printing and other helpful features, but it’s about as cheap as refillable inkjets get. Once you’ve used up the generous bundled ink, its ongoing running costs are less than 0.5p per color page. Don’t be fooled by the purchase price: the ET-2830 is a bargain.

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