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Inky fingers: the best printers for words and pictures reviewed

SONY DSC

Epson L550 Multi-function Office Inkjet Printer

Price (RRP): R3 999
Available From: These fine stores

What can it do?

The L550:

  • Prints at A4 and smaller sizes, manual duplex
  • Scans via flatbed and ADF
  • Faxes via flatbed and ADF
  • Copies via flatbed and ADF
  • Comes with USB and Ethernet connectivity
  • Supports mobile printing via Epson iPrint
  • Has an automatic document feeder
  • Uses an Ink Tank System

The L550 is easily the most interesting of the bunch. It uses Epson’s new Ink Tank System instead of traditional inkjet cartridges which is how it’s able to print over 6 000 pages per set of ink bottles at a ridiculously low cost per page. It’s fairly basic in other ways – it has no fancy colour touchscreen or WiFi connectivity, for example – but if it’s low-cost printing you’re after it’s honestly the cheapest option in town over time. It comes with an automatic document feeder, a conservative paper tray and is a great choice for low-cost home office prints in both black and colour. Interestingly, it also does a superb job of photo printing, unusual for what is, ostensibly, an office printer.

What’s it look like?

Epson loses points here with the L550’s very pedestrian design. This is another company whose design principles seem rooted in another era, with the L550 looking like it belongs to an office from the early 2000s – it’s full of horrible buttons, it has a drab two-line LCD screen and the plastic they used to make it feels rather flimsy and doesn’t look particularly nice.

How easy is it to set up?

The initial setup will take you about 40 minutes to do as the L550 is stuck down in all sorts of places, and you’ll need to fill the ink tanks manually. Once that’s done, which took us about 15 minutes, you’ll need to go through the initialisation process that’s needed to cycle the ink through the L550’s pipes to its printhead. That process takes 20 minutes to finish, during which the printer makes some interesting noises.

Only once you’ve got that done do you install Epson’s software that comes on a CDROM, which shouldn’t take you more than five minutes. As there’s no WiFi here, getting it onto a network is as easy as plugging in an Ethernet cable, which you will be prompted to do by the software at the appropriate time. Overall, this is a relatively complicated printer to set up if you’ve never done it before, but not too bad if you’re experienced and can follow instructions.

What’s Special About it?

Undoubtedly, the L550’s Ink Tank System is what sets it apart from every other printer out there. What will catch a lot of people, though, is the price – the up-front cost is quite high for a printer that looks like the L550 does – but you need to keep in mind that once that’s out of the way, the L550 will pay for itself in the long term, because refilling its ink tanks will only cost you a few hundred rand but give you around 6 000 prints. That’s pretty important when considering other printers will have doubled their costs with only two cartridge or toner refills.

How fast is it?

As much as we’d love to say the L550 is also the fastest printer around, it’s just not. No, here you’re looking at less than nine mono pages printed per minute and around five colour pages per minute. That’s not terrible, but it’s not going to win any prizes for speed. Photo printing at the highest quality level also takes a while – our test print took over ten minutes to emerge completely. Fortunately, the quality was worth the wait.

What’s the quality like?

Brilliant. Epson knows a thing or two about keeping text razor-sharp, with no visible running of the ink even on bog-standard plain paper, and even more about photo printing . The L550 does a great job of putting out accurately-coloured, highly-detailed prints and is especially good at high-resolution printing – hi-res photos in particular are nothing short of stunning. You might wait longer for it to finish printing, but the results are definitely worth the wait. Even on its Standard settings, the L550 puts out great-quality text and images.

Is it cheap to run?

Oh yes. At R129 per coloured ink bottle and R149 for each black, you’re looking at R536 for 6 000 pages, which works out to a crazy-low 9c per page. That more than makes up for its surprisingly-steep up-front cost.

Score_Epson

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