Reviewing Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One printer: The one trick pony!

Epson brags about its revolutionary EcoTank cartridge-free printing system. They have implemented it in many of their printers, and it involves using refillable ink tanks that can be refilled in minutes, with cheap ink bottles, instead of expensive cartridges. You also get to refill only the color that's missing, instead of several colors at once, just because one has run out in the color cartridge. Their EcoTank printers are more expensive than other cartridge-based printers with similar features, but Epson promises a lower total cost of ownership. We got our hands on the Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One printer, which is a popular model for US home users. We tested it for about three weeks, and this is what we have learned when using it as our printer:

What is the Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One printer good at?

The Epson Expression ET-2600 all-in-one printer is a suitable choice for home users whose top-priority is low-cost printing, and they prize this above other features.

Pros and cons

Epson Expression ET-2600 has the following strengths:

• Low-cost ink bottles that, in theory, should help you save up to 80% on refills, compared with traditional cartridge-based printers
• Refilling the ink tanks is straightforward. Even children can do it. We tested with a 10-year old. 🙂
• The Draft quality setting uses very little ink
• Good quality prints when using Standard or High-quality settings
• You can use it to print both from your PC and your smartphone or tablet (with iOS and Android)

Unfortunately, Epson Expression ET-2600 has quite a few downsides:

• If you don't pay attention when refilling the tanks, it is easy to dirty your hands or stain your clothes
• The Draft quality setting is unusable for documents with colored text and images. You have to switch to Standard
• You don't have an input paper tray for the scanner, and there is no display, only buttons, and LEDs
• It cannot do borderless prints
• Poor software and drivers that are not able to install the printer on the latest versions of Windows 10
• There is no USB cable in the box and that makes the initial setup even harder, because of the driver issues that we mentioned
• The Epson Connect feature doesn't work, and you can't print from anywhere, as promised by Epson

Verdict

The Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One printer is very much a one-trick pony: it is all about the price of refilling the ink. You pay more for the printer and a lot less to refill the ink. Also, you get good quality prints when using the Standard or High-quality settings. But, for the features that you get, Epson Expression ET-2600 is expensive. Printers from other brands, at a similar price, give you a screen that you can use when setting up and using the printer, an input paper tray for the scanner and borderless prints. To make things worse, Epson Expression ET-2600 has many driver and software related issues that ruin the user experience, especially if you are using Windows 10. Yes, the total running costs might be better with Epson Expression ET-2600, but we want a quality user experience to go with it. At the time we reviewed this printer, it doesn't deliver that. We recommend that you look at the more expensive models from the same Epson family or at printers from other brands and similar pricing.

Unboxing the Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One printer

The Epson Expression ET-2600 printer comes in a large box which features a picture of the device on the top and some of its most important characteristics.

Inside the box, you will find the following items: the printer itself, four bottles of ink (Black, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow), the power cord, the user manual and a CD with drivers and other utilities. Unfortunately, there is no USB cable inside the packaging, and this will make the installation way more difficult for some users.

The unboxing experience is quick and painless, as you would expect. There are no premium accessories. In fact, Epson has decided not to bundle a USB cable to connect the printer to a computer through a USB port. Some users will not appreciate this decision.

Hardware specifications and design

Epson brags that Expression ET-2600 comes with enough ink to print up to 4000 pages in black and 6500 color pages, using the draft quality settings. Supposedly, this is enough for two years after purchasing the printer, in normal home use. Epson says that home users tend to print, on average, about 150 pages each month. Unfortunately we, cannot verify these claims, as we have tested this printer just for three weeks, before publishing this review.

The maximum print resolution is 5760 x 1440 dpi (dots per inch). The print speed you get from Epson Expression ET-2600 is of up to 10 pages per minute when printing in black and 4.5 pages when printing in color. The input paper tray can take up to 100 sheets of paper, while the output paper tray can hold up to 30 sheets of paper. This is enough for most home users.

This all-in-one printer can also be used as a scanner or a copier. When you use it as a copier, it can copy up to 7.7 pages per minute, in black, and 3.7 pages per minute, in color.

When used as a scanner it has an optical resolution of 2400 dpi (dots per inch) and interpolated maximum resolution of 9600 dpi, which may be useful when scanning high-quality photography.

Epson Expression ET-2600 is a wireless printer and can work with the 802.11 b/g/n WiFi standards. Luckily, it also has WPS support, for faster connections to your home network.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work with modern networks that are using the 802.11ac standard and the 5 GHz frequency.

Regarding operating system support, it works with Windows (all the way from Windows XP to Windows 10), Mac OS X 10.6 or newer, Android and iOS (through the Epson iPrint mobile app).

The printer is relatively large, having 17.5" x 20.8" 11.96" or 44.45 x 52.83 x 30.37 cm in width x depth x height. It is also heavy, at 11 lb or 5 kg.

If you would like to see all the official specifications, including the types of paper it can print on, or the operating temperatures, go to this page and click "See Full Specs:" Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One Printer.

Setting up the Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One printer

Setting up the Epson Expression ET-2600 and other printers in the same Epson family is different than when dealing with conventional cartridge-based printers. After you unbox the printer and remove all the protection mechanisms, you need to fill the tanks with ink. This process is not complicated, and anyone can do it. However, it may get messy if you don't pay attention. Make sure that you don't dirty your clothes though, as the ink might not come out.

After you are done with filling the tanks, you should turn the printer on, wait for the power light to stop flashing and then press the Stop button for three seconds. The printer starts charging the ink, a process which takes approximately 20 minutes. During this time, you cannot use the printer, and you must wait for the process to finish, before doing anything else.

Next, load the paper and install the printer's software on a computer where you want to use it. We tried to install Epson Expression ET-2600 on a desktop computer with Windows 10 Creators Update freshly installed and then on another one with Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Epson's setup program has repeatedly failed and kept saying that: "The IP address of the printer may be incorrect. Make sure that DHCP is valid in your network."

The same connectivity problems were also encountered when using the Epson Connect Printer Setup program, which helps you make an Epson Connect account that you can use to print from anywhere on the internet. No matter what we did, Epson's software was incapable of installing the printer. We tested two other wireless printers on the same network, from other brands, and all of them were installed without issues. This problem is a software one, caused by Epson's programming.

This issue is even more aggravated by the fact that there is no USB cable bundled. If there were, you could install the printer using that and then configure it to work on your wireless network. Luckily, we could use WPS to connect the printer to the wireless network and the setup wizard from Windows 10, for adding a printer. Windows 10 was able to detect and install the printer in seconds. After that, most of Epson's applications started to detect the printer, and we were able to use it, but without the Epson Connect feature.

We also installed the Epson iPrint and Epson Print Enabler mobile apps for Android and installed the printer on a Nexus 6P smartphone with Android 8.0 Oreo. We were able to install the apps, detect the printer and configure it for mobile printing.

Installing and setting up Epson Expression ET-2600 is a lengthier process than on traditional cartridge-based printers. Also, it is more difficult than it should be, because Epson doesn't bundle a USB cable with the printer and its Windows drivers and software have bugs and problems that need to be fixed.

Go to the second page of this review if you want to learn about the print quality and the experience you get when copying and scanning documents, pictures, and images.

Printing with the Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One printer

We printed hundreds of pages with the Epson Expression ET-2600, mostly on plain paper, but also on glossy photo paper. We started by printing pictures and images, using all kinds of Windows apps.

Printing images on normal paper works well, but colors tend to be a bit washed out. However, the audience for this printer is home users, not artists, and for most people, the results will be satisfactory, on the Standard quality setting.

When printing pictures on glossy photo paper, results were good looking. However, the printed pictures tended to be darker than the original, with less light being captured on paper.

If you want excellent results, you must switch to the High-quality setting, which increases a lot the time spent printing and the ink consumption.

Next, we printed documents with colored text and images, using the three available quality settings: Draft, Standard, and High. The results we had when using Draft quality were poor. Honestly, for colored documents, the Draft quality setting is unusable, as light colors are barely visible. Also, competing printers with a similar price tend to offer better quality on Draft settings.

However, when you switch to Standard, the quality is improved a lot, and most users will be satisfied with the results. The switch to High quality enhances the outcome even further, but it also increases the ink consumption.

Lastly, we printed text documents that use only the color black, with the same quality settings. In this case, the Draft quality setting is a bit more usable, if the documents that you print are not important. Again, the quality you get in this setting is lower than that of other printers with a similar price. Luckily, the quality of your printed documents improves drastically on the Standard setting. Printing black text on High quality doesn't provide too many improvements, and you won't need to use it unless you have a very important document for printing and the people reading it care a lot about high-quality print.

We also printed a few images and documents from our Nexus 6P smartphone with Android 8.0 Oreo. We found that the Epson iPrint app is a bit cumbersome to use. The results you get are not as satisfactory as on Windows. However, if you need to print something quickly, and you only have your smartphone around, Epson iPrint gets the job done.

We observed that each time the Epson Expression ET-2600 finishes printing something, it makes a whizzing sound, most probably caused by the systems which charge the ink. Some people may find it annoying, even if it is not a loud sound. Another interesting difference when compared to other printers is the boot time of the printer: from the moment you turn on the Epson Expression ET-2600, and the moment it accepts printing jobs, you have to wait for noticeably longer than when using cartridge-based printers. Again, this may be caused by the different printing process that involves charging the ink first.

One issue that may be important to some users is that Epson Expression ET-2600 cannot do borderless prints. If you look at all our printed samples, they all have white borders.

One unique aspect to Epson printers in the same line-up as Expression ET-2600 is the fact that they have ink tanks that are visible from the outside. It is easy to see which ink you tend to consume most and how fast you run out of ink. For example, in the picture below you can immediately see that we used more Yellow and Magenta than Cyan and Black.

Printing with the Epson Expression ET-2600 is as easy as it should be. However, the Draft quality setting delivers inferior results, and most users won't want to use it. If you switch to Standard, your printed pages look a lot better, enough to please most users. But, this comes at the cost of consuming more ink than Epson used in its estimations for how many pages you can print with a full ink tank.

Scanning and copying with the Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One

Next, we switched to using the Epson Expression ET-2600 as a copier and then as a scanner. If you want to copy something quickly, you place the paper in the scanner section and press the Copy Black or Copy Color button. You can also set how many copies you want, before that. For these activities, it would have been useful to have a small display at hand. However, this is available only for pricier models in Epson's portfolio. Also, similarly priced printers from the competition tend to offer this feature.

Then, we used the scanning features of the Epson Expression ET-2600. The scanning apps have lots of settings and presets for you to use and configure. When scanning documents, the results are satisfactory. However, you will quickly feel the need for a paper feed just for the scanner. On the Epson Expression ET-2600, when you need to scan a document with many pages, you have to scan and change the pages one by one, making the process time-consuming. Similarly priced printers from the competition tend to offer an automatic feed.

Scanning images and photographs delivers average-quality results. Also, the presets for scanning pictures take a lot more time than those for scanning documents. We might sound like a broken record by now, but we have had better quality on similarly priced all-in-ones from other brands.

Scanning and copying on the Epson Expression ET-2600 are things you can do. However, it takes more time than on competing all-in-ones, and the results you get are of average quality. Competing brands tend to offer better experiences at a similar price point.

Bugs and problems with Epson's software

Hardware-wise, Epson Expression ET-2600 is a capable all-in-one that can satisfy the needs of most home users. Unfortunately, the user experience is ruined by the many issues and bugs with Epson's drivers and software. The worst problem is with the Printer Setup program. On Windows 10, it doesn't work when it comes to installing and setting up the printer. We tried many settings. We even reset the configuration of our wireless router and disabled all security products. Nothing helped. The printer setup was unsuccessful. This issue is made worse by the fact that Epson decided not to bundle a USB cable. We are technology experts, with lots of studies and certifications in IT. If we couldn't set up this printer with Epson's software (we even tried older versions), imagine the frustration a regular home user would feel when stumbling on the same problem.

We were lucky that Windows 10 did a good job at detecting and installing the printer on its own, by going "Settings -> Devices -> Printers & scanners -> Add a printer or scanner." If Windows 10 hadn't have helped, we could not have used Epson Expression ET-2600, and we would have had to return it. Epson needs to fix this problem. Their setup programs do not work well on Windows 10, and Windows 10 is the second most used operating system on modern computers, after Windows 7. Also, it comes preinstalled on most new computers that are sold to home users - the audience of this printer.

The Epson Connect Printer program did not detect the Epson Expression ET-2600, and we could not use a feature which we wanted to have: printing from anywhere on the internet.

To make things worse, Epson Connect Services did not work either. According to Epson, your printer can get a unique email address and, if you send a document or a picture to that address, Epson Expression ET-2600 prints it automatically. We couldn't get this to work either.

If Epson is reading this review, here's a screenshot of where they can see the firmware version that we were using, as well as the root certificate used for Epson's cloud services.

We believe that the issues we encountered during this review are very frustrating and Epson should fix things as soon as possible. We will also send this review to them, in the hope that they will do something to fix their software as quickly as possible.

What is your opinion about the Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One?

Now you know about the experience we had with the Epson Expression ET-2600 EcoTank All-in-One printer. Before closing this review, share with us what you think about this model. If you have purchased it already, what is your experience with this printer? Is it similar? Comment below and let's have a conversation.