Epson Expression Premium ET-7750 EcoTank Wide-Format All-in-One Supertank Printer Review

Top of the line in Epson's latest round of seven new EcoTank all-in-one (AIO) printers, the Expression Premium ET-7750 EcoTank Wide-Format All-in-One Supertank Printer ($649.99) is unique to all other Epson EcoTank and/or Canon MegaTank bulk-ink AIOs. Granted, many cartridge-less AIOs print good-looking photos, but the ET-7750 is the first (aside from its ET-7700 sibling) consumer-grade five-ink supertank photo printer, making it one of the least-expensive-to-use photo AIOs on the market. That, and its ability to print borderless tabloid-size pages and photos, makes it a great buy for photo enthusiasts who will use it enough to take advantage of the low ink costs.

Loaded—and Not Just With Ink

To accommodate the larger paper size of this wide-format AIO, the ET-7750 ($799.99 at Amazon Canada) has a larger footprint than standard letter-size inkjet printers. It measures 17.8 by 20.7 by 29.3 inches and weighs 23.4 pounds, a bit large for placement on an average-size desk. The only other wide-format supertank AIO I know of, Epson's own WorkForce ET-16500 EcoTank Wide-Format All-in-One Supertank Printer ($799.99 at Amazon Canada) , which supports larger paper, and has two large paper cassettes and an automatic document feeder (or ADF, which the ET-7750 does not), weighs about twice as much as the ET-7750, but it's actually a little smaller.

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HP's business-centric wide-format AIO, the OfficeJet Pro 7720 ($799.99 at Amazon Canada) , a non-supertank model, is significantly smaller (and much less expensive) than the ET-7750, but then its running costs are much higher. The HP 7720 also doesn't print photos as well; it uses only the standard four process color inks: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). As with other Epson five-ink consumer-grade photo printers, including the Expression Premium XP-640 Small-in-One Printer, the ET-7750's additional ink is a pigment-based "Photo Black." This additional black ink, according to Epson, enriches the blacks in photos and graphics, making them deeper and richer, and it extends the color gamut some, providing truer colors overall.

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As to paper handling, the ET-7750 has three paper input trays: two 100-sheet trays (one in the front, one in the back) and a 20-sheet snapshot-size (4 by 6 and 5 by 7 inches) tray that slides in above the front drawer. In addition to plain paper up to 11 by 17 inches in the rear tray, you can also load large, premium photo sheets up to tabloid-size, allowing you to override the front tray when you need to churn out a quick off-size photograph or illustration—without opening and reconfiguring the front drawer.

The ET-7750 doesn't come with an ADF for sending multipage documents to the scanner, which is unusual for an all-in-one printer at its price. In addition, the control panel is a 2.7-inch non-touch color LCD surrounded by about a dozen buttons, including a set of arrow keys and an OK button for navigating the screen and initiating functions, as well as Plus and Minus keys for setting the number of copies, and Start and Stop buttons for initiating copy and scan jobs, or canceling ongoing tasks, respectively.

In addition to printing on a wide range of varying media types and sizes, the ET-7750 can also print labels on optical disks via a small caddy that slides in just above the photo paper tray, under the control panel.

Setup, Connections, and Software

Despite its size, the ET-7750 is very easy to get out of its box. There's quite a bit of tape holding everything in place, as well as a few small strategically placed labels informing you of things like: save this bit of packing material in case you need to transport the printer, or load ink before you turn on the printer.

Speaking of ink, Epson has greatly improved the ink bottles themselves, as well as the ink receptacles on the printer. Each bottle is topped with a fixture containing a leak-proof nozzle and a key that fits only the fixture on the corresponding reservoir in the machine, making it next to impossible to mismatch ink colors and their respective containers. In addition, the bottles and printer fixtures are designed so that you can upend the bottles and leave them sitting upside down, draining, until the tank is full. Then you can, despite the fair amount of ink left in the bottle, disconnect and turn the bottle over without dripping any ink on undesired locations, such as your new printer or your desktop.

The ET-7750's connectivity options are Wi-Fi, Ethernet, connecting to a single PC via USB, and the peer-to-peer network protocol for connecting mobile devices to your printer without either of them or it being connected to a network, Wi-Fi Direct. It does not support another peer-to-peer protocol, near field communication (NFC), which enables wireless printing when a mobile device is touching or in close proximity to a compatible printer. You do get support for USB thumb drives and SD memory cards. Epson's own Epson Connect, a collection of scanning and printing apps, is also included.

The software bundle that Epson includes with its photo printers, while basic, is somewhat inclusive. It includes Epson Scan 2, a highly useful scanner interface with optical character recognition (OCR) built in; Epson CD Print for printing labels on optical discs; and Epson Web Print and Epson Connect for printing over the Internet and emails. And, if you don't have a decent photo editor/enhancer, you can download Epson's Easy Photo Print, a basic but useful little program.

Basic Performance, Outstanding Print Quality

Like most other consumer-grade photo printers PCMag has tested, compared with its business-centric counterparts, the ET-7750 is slow. Epson rates it at 13 letter-size pages per minute (ppm) and 10ppm for color pages. Its office-centric competitor, the HP 7720, on the other hand, is rated at 22ppm. But then some other supertank printers, such as all four of Canon's MegaTank models, are rated as low as 8.8ppm.

I tested the ET-7750 over Ethernet from our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional. While printing our 12-page Microsoft Word monochrome test document, I clocked the ET-7750 at 13.8ppm, just more than Epson's rating. That's 6.7ppm faster than the Canon G4200, 9.1ppm faster than the Epson ET-16500, but 9.5ppm slower than the business-oriented HP 7740. Perhaps a more direct competitor to the ET-7750, the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma TS9120 ($799.99 at Amazon Canada) (a six-ink consumer-grade photo printer), managed 13.2ppm, about the same speed as the ET-7750. (Note, though, that the TS9120 can't print wide-format pages.)

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When I combined the scores from printing our separate PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files containing color, graphics, and photos with the results from printing the Microsoft Word file in the previous test, the ET-7750 churned at the rate of 8ppm, which isn't bad compared with many of its competitors. It beat the Canon G4200 by 5ppm, the Epson ET-16500 by 3.6ppm, the Canon TS9120 by 3.3ppm, and fell behind the office-centric HP 7720 by only 2.1ppm, which, given that the HP 7720 is geared to officee printing, is impressive.

Finally, the ET-7750 printed our two sample 4-by-6-inch snapshots at an average of 41 seconds, which is a few seconds slower than most of the others discussed here, but very good overall.

Above all else, the Epson ET-7750 prints very well. Text comes out well-shaped and highly legible for all but the smallest type sizes, making it suitable for most home, student, and even business output scenarios, except, perhaps, documents with tiny fonts. Our test PowerPoint handouts and full-page Excel charts and graphs were close to perfect, with accurate color matching, bright, vibrant colors and excellent detail. Gradients flowed smoothly, dark fills were solid, and hairlines printed unbroken from end-to-end.

But where the ET-7750 really excelled was at printing photos, on both plain and premium glossy paper, meaning that your images should look good when embedded in larger documents or as standalone keeper memories. I have no complaints about the ET-7750's print and copy quality.

How Low Can You Go?

As with all EcoTank printers, the ET-7750's running costs are among the lowest on the market. Only Canon's MegaTank printers, such as the G4200, are comparable. In fact, these two brands deliver essentially the same cost per page (CPP) for both monochrome and color pages. Due to the ET-7750's fifth ink, though, pages that include photos (and standalone photos themselves) should have just slightly higher running costs. However, since there's no way to tell when the second black ink kicks in, and how much ink is used when it does, I can't calculate just how much it affects the CPP, but I suspect that it's not by much.

That said, using Epson's advertised page yields and prices for replacement ink bottles for the ET-7750, I calculated the cost per monochrome page at 0.3 cents and the cost per color page at 1.1 cents. As mentioned, these are very close to the Canon MegaTank AIOs' running costs. The business-centric HP 7720's per-page costs, on the other hand, are 2.1 cents monochrome and 8.1 cents color. Yet another alternative is one of Brother's INKvestment AIOs, such as the Editors' Choice wide-format MFC-J6935DW ($799.99 at Amazon Canada) , which delivers running costs of one penny for black pages and 4.7 cents for color pages. It, too, prints quite well, but you won't get quite the same stellar photo and graphics print quality.

The Next Logical Step

Since Epson released its EcoTank line a few years ago, I've ask the company a few times about the advent of supertank photo printers. Given how much it costs to use a traditional five- or six-ink consumer-grade photo AIO, if you print a lot of documents and photos, with the ET-7750 you should realize significant savings on ink; however, given its $650 price tag, it may take a few months to make up the difference in price between the ET-7750 and another tabloid-size AIO. In other words, if you don't use the printer, and use it often, paying this much doesn't make much sense.

If you can live with the purchase price, the Epson Expression ET-7750 delivers wide-format photo printing at a low cost per print, which until now was unheard of. If you're looking for is a wide-format business printer with relatively low running costs, Brother's MFC-J6935DW is a good value. But if you need to print a lot of high-quality photos and artwork at various sizes up to 11 by 17 inches, the ET-7750 is the way to go.

4.0See It $1,585.97 at AmazonMSRP $649.99View MoreView More

The Epson Expression Premium ET-7750 produces exceptional output at very low running costs, making it a terrific value if you use it often enough to justify its purchase price.

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