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Printed using the VFA media setting and the ABW print mode. Take care with feeding and margins. Similar papers – very different results
The ET series are capable plain-paper office printers. I didn’t time the output when I printed text documents, but it was certainly fast – practically, it’s more than fast enough for almost any single user or even for a couple of users to share, and it’s nowhere near sturdy enough to serve a larger workgroup as an office printer, no matter how tempting the ink cost might be. Print quality is also very good – most modern office inkjets do a nice job, and the ET-8550 is certainly right in that range. It’s clearly better than a four year old Epson WorkForce all-in one I had around for comparison. It’s not quite at the level of some of the HP OfficeJets as a text printer. Of course, the gold standard for text printing is a decent laser printer, and no “normal” inkjet is as good as a good laser. I haven’t used the higher-end HPs that claim to be true laser quality, but my suspicion is that they’re quite a bit better than most inkjets – the OfficeJets right below them are notable for their text quality. The top feed can also take custom sheet sizes, such as this 1 metre length cut from a 13″ roll of matte art paper. In diffuse daylight the slight warmth of the ‘natural’ paper shows (printed with he VFA media setting) and overall print neutrality is good.
Design and usability: A nice-looking printer that's simple to set up and easy to use
Copying works fine (with enlargement too) and the printer has an array of preset documents you can print – from calendar and reminder sheets, to musical score sheets and graph paper. Access these from the aptly named ‘Various Prints’ menu option. I’ve also reviewed the similar Epson ET-8500. This is an identical printer, but only takes paper up to 8.5″ width or A4 size. As part of this I created some additional 8500/8550 ICC profiles and have a number of additional videos which are mostly of relevance to 8550 users as well. Print quality can be excellent but is very dependent on paper choices and profiles. This is fine for some users, but if you are just looking for something ‘that works’ the limitations of available media may be an issue to start with.
The grey ink allows for mixing with the strong colours, and along with variable drop sizes helping negate some of the need for light colours – usually light cyan and light magenta. It also helps in greyscale reproduction delivering better B&W printing (I’ll be returning to B&W in a bit). The paper tray seems best used for plain paper and thin photo paper – almost all my photo prints and cards went in via the top. I’m going to suggest installing all of the options, since some of the software many be more useful that you’d thought.
It’s a nice paper, and I’ve used it as a generic cotton art paper for testing with many printers and printer profiling set-ups. In addition to writing hundreds of articles for PCMag, over the years he also wrote for many other computer and business publications, among them Computer Shopper, Digital Trends, MacUser, PC World, The Wirecutter, and Windows Magazine. He also served as the Printers and Scanners Expert at About.com. Smart Panel allows you to operate and manage the ET-8550 locally or remotely. Supported operating systems are Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. In addition, you get TWAIN and WIA drivers for connecting the scanner to third-party programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word. Paper Formats: A3+, A3 (29.7×42.0 cm), A4 (21.0×29.7 cm), A5 (14.8×21.0 cm), A6 (10.5×14.8 cm), B5 (17.6×25.7 cm), B6 (12.5×17.6 cm), C6 (Envelope), DL (Envelope), No. 10 (Envelope), Letter, 10 x 15 cm, 13 x 18 cm, 100 x 148 mm, User defined, B4 (25.7×36.4 cm), Legal, Executive Most images during my testing were printed from Photoshop – albeit an old version (CS6). Some were printed directly and others using the Epson EPL software.
Printing is slow or the printer stops printing when I try to print from Windows or my Mac. What should I do? That’s not an 8550 complaint – if I want vibrant pie charts and sales graphs on plain paper, I’ll get a colour laser printer and accept that it won’t be much good for photos…
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Taking one of my test images, which has some difficult to print colours in it, I get two very different looking prints Pigment inks were for prints that could last for many years and dyes for snaps that were not to be kept. This is a printer that can fire the printing enthusiasm – sure, paper will cost and the inks will need filling up, but it’s easy to use. Now, neither of these is ‘correct’ or ‘wrong’ They are the best example I’ve seen for a long while that shows how profiling produces the ‘best’ results for a particular paper, not makes them all the same or matches your screen This also beats Canon’s G650 and G7050 A4 ink-tank printers and beats the speeds achieved by Epson’s four-colour ET-2750. Colour prints arrived fast, too, produced at 6.1ppm – three times faster than Canon’s six-colour G650.
Now, it doesn’t mention the ET-8550 specifically and I did find some glitches in setting custom paper sizes, but when it worked it worked just fine (On a Mac running 10.14 – we have no win PCs or new Macs here) Unfortunately, there’s no way I know of knowing which category a particular art paper will fall into without testing. Another group of users who might appreciate the ET-8550 are photographers who are interested in printing, but not yet ready for a top-end dedicated photo printer, especially if they also want the office printing and scanning features. For a premium of a couple hundred dollars over a comparable EcoTank printer without the photo capabilities, you get a printer that encourages you to explore photo printing. Since ink and its preferred papers are both reasonably priced, there is little financial penalty to remaking a print until you like it. The particular card here is a 285gsm etching paper from Fotospeed in the UK, which I’ve created a custom profile for. In our tests, text was well-shaped and highly legible, with attractive kerning and leading (character and line spacing) at nearly all font sizes we test. The decorative fonts came out looking better than average, and a little easier to read at smaller sizes.The combined average score was 7.9ppm—not necessarily slow for a photo printer in this genre, but as printers go in general, it’s not particularly fast. However, in this regard the ET-8550 handily beats the Pixma TS9520, which managed only 4.7ppm. Saving the image as a TIFF file (colour management turned off), I was able to import it into i1Profiler to create a custom profile. In general, art papers print well with the 8550 ink set, especially with the VFA media setting. That said, experimentation is necessary.
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