Epson EcoTank ET-2830 review: A consumer ink tank with the pace of a business printer

Epson has a bewildering number of ink tank models in its EcoTank range, with the differences between models often hard to pin down. The Epson EcoTank ET-2830 is a typical example, with a decent showing in the features lists but a few missing elements that help keep the price reasonable, at least for an ink tank printer that comes with enough ink to print thousands of pages straight out of the box.

However, there’s one other thing on the features list that Epson promises will give this printer an edge over its siblings: the inclusion of the manufacturer’s relatively new PrecisionCore print head. This promises greater accuracy and efficiency over Epson’s previous Micro Piezo heads. Thanks to our benchmark tests and archive of sample prints we can see how much of a difference this makes, if any, and not have to rely on Epson’s marketing messages alone.

Epson EcoTank ET-2830 review: What do you get for the money?

The Epson EcoTank ET-2830 has the same core features (printer, scanner and copier) and £250 RRP as the EcoTank ET-2876, though the latter doesn’t have the new PrecisionCore print head.

In terms of its specification, the new print head has 400 black nozzles and 128 nozzles for each colour. The older Micro Piezo print head only had 180 black nozzles and 59 for each colour. Interestingly, however, the print resolution has gone down, with the Epson ET-2876 printing at a maximum of 5,760 x 1,440dpi, where this ET-2830 is quoted at 4,800 x 1,200dpi.

Where’s the benefit, then? Well, scrolling further through Epson’s specifications we find its quoted print speeds. Here, there’s a significant boost for the ET-2830, with maximum mono print speeds staying the same, but colour speed increasing from 15ppm to 20ppm.

Although the headline top speed of mono printing hasn’t increased, the quoted speed for printing the ISO 24734 standard document has, leaping from 10ppm on the ET-2876 to 15ppm on this ET-2830. Don’t read too much into all this just yet, though – you can check how these two models compare in our own real world speed and print quality tests below.

Where the ET-2830 really misses out compared with the ET-2876 is that it doesn’t have a screen. Instead you have to explore the printer’s features through either the Epson software on the device you’re using to print, or navigate your way around the printer’s control panel.

This is situated on the top of the printer in a long row of buttons, icons and LED lights, which stretches across more than half of the width of the unit. If all you’re likely to want to do is check that the printer is switched on and make either colour or mono copies, then everything you need is here. But you aren’t going to be able to delve into the printer’s settings, switch Wi-Fi passwords and perform maintenance tasks as easily as if you had a screen.

Being at Epson’s more affordable end of the EcoTank scale, it also lacks some of the mechanical luxuries you’ll find on more expensive printers. The copier doesn’t have an automatic sheet feeder, so multi page copies have to be performed manually. There’s only a rear paper tray, which maxes out at 100 sheets and doesn’t protect the paper from household dust.

It also lacks automatic duplex printing. You can still print on both sides of a sheet, but it prints one side first, then asks you to flip and reload the paper manually to print on the other side.

There’s no skimping on the ink in the box, however. The printer comes supplied with enough ink to print an estimated 6,600 mono pages and 5,900 colour. By Epson’s estimations, that’s around three years worth of ink.

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Epson Eco-Tank ET-2830 review: Is it easy to use?

Epson has refined its setup procedure over the years and as long as you’re happy to use a smartphone to follow the step by step instructions, there’s nothing complicated about getting the Epson EcoTank ET-2830 going.

That process sets up the Wi-Fi and gets you through installing the ink. You can then easily print from any mobile device by installing the app and being on the same Wi-Fi network. You can also use the app as a sort of surrogate screen, and set off copies and scans from the device without having to work out the buttons on the device.

From a computer you can go through the software installation, which isn’t quite as slick as the smartphone app but still does the job, or you can just download the drivers you’ll need from Epson’s website and install the printer that way.

Once the printer is set up, all interaction can be performed through the app or computer software. The app is easy to use. The Windows driver is a bit more complicated but it’s still just a matter of choosing elements from menus of options, depending on what you want to print and how you want to print it.

Epson EcoTank ET-2830 review: How fast is it and how much does it cost to run?

As ever with ink tank printers, the headline advantage of the Epson EcoTank ET-2830 is that it produces truly low cost prints. As we’ve mentioned, the box provides enough ink to produce up to 6,600 mono pages or 5,900 colour prints.

That’s a slight difference on previous models, despite Epson supplying the same quantity of the same ink. The ET-2876, for example, which has the older print head, is rated for 3,600 mono pages and 6,500 colour pages out of the box.

When you eventually need to buy more ink, it’s as affordable as ever. Individual bottles cost £9.49 purchased direct from Epson, and contain 65ml each. Here, Epson quotes the same page capacity per bottle as with previous printers.

The black bottle can produce 4,500 pages (based on printing 5% coverage of a page), which works out at 0.2p per page. A complete set of cyan, magenta and yellow inks produces 7,500 pages, at a cost of 0.4p per page. You can knock the price down a little further if you keep your colour printing balanced, with a pack of four inks (one of each colour) knocking £3.47 off the price of buying the same four inks individually.

When it comes to speed, it seems that we can listen to Epson’s marketing after all. The PrecisionCore print head really has pushed the boat out in terms of print speeds. Compared to the ET-2876 it knocks four seconds off the time it takes to produce the first page of a run of mono prints, and even outpaces the cartridge-based HP Envy Inspire 7220e.

As the print run continues, every sheet is quicker to appear from the machine, with my mono test prints coming out at 13.4ppm, and colour prints appearing at a rate of 4.5ppm. That’s faster than every other printer we’ve compared it with, as you can see in the chart below.

It took the Epson EcoTank ET-2830 13 mins to produce six high quality photo prints but was beaten here by the Canon Pixma G650, which printed the same job in less than 11 minutes. However, the ET-2830 was still faster in this test than both the ET-2876 and the HP Envy Inspire 7220e.

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Epson EcoTank ET-2830 review: What’s print quality like?

From a regular reading distance, it’s difficult to see much difference in the output between these inkjet printers. However, looking up close through a magnifying glass I thought the quality of printing on the Epson EcoTank ET-2830 was better than the printing from the EcoTank ET-2876.

The text is better defined and darker than the output from the older print head. However, the cartridge ink of the HP Envy Inspire 7220e still trumps the others, with the darkest and sharpest text prints.

Documents with a mixture of text and business graphics come out best on the Canon Pixma G650, with richer colours on images thanks to its additional inks. Text is still at its best from the regular cartridges of the HP printer, but its graphics were afflicted by some banding which neither the Canon nor the Epson printers suffer from. That leaves the Epson ET-2830 in the middle of the pack.

It produced perfectly acceptable photo prints, and I marginally preferred the prints of the ET-2830 to those of the ET-2876, as it added a little more richness to the colour. Both produced better photo prints than the HP Envy Inspire 7220e by a significant margin, but if it’s photos you’re most interested in printing, then the Canon Pixma G650 is the model you want.

Having said that, however, I was impressed with the depth of the black printing on photos. The Canon’s black has something of a colour cast to it, which I didn’t get with the inky black produced by the Epson EcoTank ET-2830.

Epson EcoTank ET-2830 review: Should you buy it?

The Epson EcoTank ET-2830 has quite a few things going for it. It’s the fastest consumer ink tank printer I’ve seen to date with a fair print quality across the board. There are faster inkjets around if you need a speedier printer for an office environment, but if you simply don’t want to wait for your basic home-office prints, this is a capable and affordable alternative.

I was a bit disappointed by what’s missing, though. A decent paper tray feels like an essential for all but the most casual of printing devices. The lack of screen makes the printer harder to use as a copier, and trickier to maintain if things go wrong. Also, the lack of automatic duplex printing feels like it might lead to wasted paper, particularly if you share your printer with people who can’t be bothered to manually flip the paper half way through every print job.

If the lack of screen bothers you, you can opt for the Epson EcoTank ET-2876. You’ll get similar results from the same ink, but it uses Epson’s older print head so isn’t as fast as the ET-2830. The screen is small and navigated with buttons to the side, but if something goes wrong at least you get more information on how to fix it.

For a similar price you could get the Canon Pixma G650 instead. This is also an ink tank printer but it uses more inks to print more impressive colour, especially when printing photos. As a result, however, it’s a little bit more expensive to run, but still significantly cheaper than most cartridge-based models.