Verdict

The Epson ET-2720 is great value for money; it pulls off the hat-trick of low running costs, high print quality, and a relatively low RRP.

Pros

• Low running costs
• Affordable price
• Great print quality

Cons

• Low paper capacity
• No WPS
• No auto duplexing

The Epson ET-2720 all-in-one is aimed at families who want to run off copies of holiday snaps, and students who need to print images as well as essays.

The Epson EcoTank refills are also inexpensive, and are good for thousands of print runs. Jobs can be queued from Windows or Mac machines via USB, and also from phones and tablets, via the Epson iPrint iOS and Android app.

Epson ET-2720 – Design and Features

The Epson ET-2720 is a squat black cuboid, measuring 179 x 375‎ x 347mm and weighing 4.5kg. This is moderately big for a home office printer, but not a space hog. On the front sits a control panel, which either hangs flush to the front of the printer or can be tilted all the way up so it’s parallel with the topside. The panel features a 1.44-inch non-touch display. Arrow keys, OK, Cancel, Back and Home buttons let you navigate through all of the settings.

Underneath the panel sits an extendable out-tray. The scanner/copier glass sits underneath a flap on the top, as you’d expect, and paper (up to 100 sheets of A4) is loaded in at the back. The ink tank sits to the right of the control panel, and features four separate chambers for black, yellow, magenta, and cyan ink.

Filling these up is easy as pie, as the Epson 104 bottles the ET-2720 takes feature nozzles designed to fit the ink tank perfectly – just unscrew the lid, drop the bottle in place, and wait for the ink to fully decant.

Setting the ET-2720 up is a breeze, although not entirely snag-free; Mac users may have to go on a bit of a hunt for the correct drivers as I did. When it came to connecting the ET-2720 to my router, and inputting the long and hard-to-crack SSID password, the control panel, with its tiny screen and arrow keys, made for pretty slow going. The absence of Ethernet or WPS for secure wired or fast wireless pairing means this and good old USB are your only networking options.

Once you’re set up, you can send print commands to the ET-2720 from your phone with the Epson iPrint app. This is fun and convenient, allowing you to ping selfies and other silly things from your phone to the ET-2720, and it’ll spit them out in a matter of seconds. On top of that, the app serves as a remote diagnostic panel, which, amongst other things, lets you see how much ink is left in the tank. You can also print files from the cloud (Google Drive, Box, Evernote, OneDrive and Dropbox), and the document capture feature lets you take a quick photo and print it immediately.

Negatives include no automatic duplex printing, so if you want to print something on the other side of a piece of paper, you’re going to have to figure that out yourself. Likewise, the Epson ET-2720 can only scan one side of a document at a time.

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Epson ET-2720 – Print Speed and Quality

The Epson ET-2720 is no slouch. In tests, it printed a five-page document in 29.5 seconds (10.16ppm) and a 20 page document in 2 minutes and 1 second (9.92ppm). That’s very quick off the mark, ever so slightly faster than Epson’s own single-purpose monochrome ET-M112 printer. The Epson ET-2720 took roughly half a minute (33.7 seconds) to print a single 1.9MB colour JPEG.

Quality is also excellent. Even on small 10pt text, serifs were crisp and well defined, and the colour reproduction was accurate and vibrant considering this is a £200-ish home printer. As for the economics, the Epson ET-2720 isn’t likely to break the bank in the long or the short term.

Epson says you’re guaranteed 4500 pages in black and 7500 in colour with the standard set of 65ml 104 bottles, which cost around £10 each. Canny shoppers will be able to pick up a full set for around £20. Cost per page here roughly works out at a very nice 0.3p for black ink prints, and 0.1p for colour prints. That’s fantastic value compared to similarly-priced cartridges.

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Should you buy the Epson ET-2720?

Priced at £220 at the time of writing, the Epson ET-2720 is a very compelling proposition. It’s cheap to run, fairly easy to set up, and comes with features – mainly colour printing and a scanner/copier – that its stablemate the Epson ET-M112 doesn’t bring to the table.

The ET-M112 is only slightly cheaper, and the running costs are very similar. If you want a more versatile printer that can still fire off thousands of pages of text in high quality for literal pennies, then the choice is clear – get the ET-2720.

The only real downsides here are the fact that you can only have up to 100 pages in the hopper, and there’s no automatic duplexing. Other than that, this is an excellent option.

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