A rung up on Epson's ladder from the Epson Expression ET-3700 EcoTank All-in-one Supertank Printer, the more office-centric Epson WorkForce ET-3750 EcoTank All-in-One ($399.99) shares that model's extremely low running costs while adding an automatic document feeder (ADF) and Epson's PrecisionCore technology, which is likely responsible for the ET-3750's excellent text quality. Although it is priced higher than similarly equipped conventional all-in-one printers, it has considerably lower running costs than even the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J985DW, whose high-yield, low-priced ink cartridges offer substantial cost savings over typical all-in ones. The ET-3750's Achilles' heel is its relatively sparse feature set, eschewing fax capabilities, a port for a USB thumb drive, and a memory-card slot, which are all found in the MFC-J985DW.

A Basic Feature Set

The ET-3750 can print, copy, and scan, but not fax. It measures 9.1 by 14.8 by 13.7 inches (HWD), and weighs 16 pounds. You can control copying and scanning, and perform setup and maintenance tasks, from the front panel's small (2.4-inch) non-touch display, four-way controller, and related function buttons. Paper capacity is up to 150 sheets of plain paper, a suitable amount for a typical home office. It has an auto-duplexer for two-sided printing. A 30-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) can be used for scanning or copying multipage documents, and it has a flatbed that can hold up to letter-sized paper. Unfortunately, the printer lacks a port for a USB thumb drive, so you'll always need to be attached to a PC.

In Praise of Bottled Ink

With earlier EcoTank models such as the ET-2550, there was some risk of minor ink spills, onto the top of the printer if not your hands (although Epson does supply a pair of gloves for your protection). With its new EcoTank printers, including the ET-3750, Epson has introduced a more failsafe ink-delivery system, the top of each bottle is equipped with a sealed plastic "dock" that snugly fits into a receptacle on top of the corresponding ink tank on the printer. Once the bottle is attached to the receptacle, the ink will flow freely without your having to squeeze or even hold onto the bottle. Once all the ink pours into the tank, you can remove and dispose of the bottle. I didn't spill a drop in testing this printer.

Each bottle includes enough ink to fill its tank, and it should be a long time until you're in need of a refill. Epson rates its black ink bottle, which it sells for $19.99, as good for 7,500 printed pages, and its three color bottles, which it sells for $13.99 each, for 6,000 pages. This translates to running costs of a mere 0.3 cents per black page and a penny per color page, effectively matching other Epson EcoTank and Canon MegaTank printers for the lowest per-page costs we've seen. Even better, Epson includes two full sets of cartridges, as is also the case with the Epson WorkForce ET-3700.

Typical Home-Office Connectivity

Connectivity includes USB, Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and a direct peer-to-peer connection to a computer or mobile device via Wi-Fi Direct. The ET-3750 supports printing from the Epson iPrint app for iOS or Android, and Epson Email Print and Epson Remote Print, which both allow users to automatically print to the ET-2750 by sending it documents via email. Epson gives you the option of having an email address assigned to the printer during the setup process, which you can change to an address more to your liking. I tested the printer over an Ethernet connection, with its driver installed on a computer running Windows 10 Professional.

Lickety-Split

In printing our text-only (Word) test document, the ET-3750 averaged 15.3 pages per minute (ppm), a hair faster than its 15ppm rated speed. I timed it on our full business suite, which includes documents with graphics and photos in addition to the Word document, at 7.5ppm. These speeds are fast for an inkjet all-in-one, and a hair faster than the Epson ET-3700 (15ppm on the Word document and 7.4ppm for the full suite). We timed the Brother MFC-J775DW at 10ppm on the Word document, and 4.6ppm for the entire suite.

See How We Test Printers

Stellar Text Quality

Output quality proved a little above par in my testing, with excellent text quality, above-par graphics, and slightly below-par photos. Text quality should be fine for most business use, except for ones that require tiny fonts.

With graphics, a few backgrounds looked slightly dull, and several exhibited very mild banding (a regular pattern of faint striations), but they are still easily good enough for PowerPoint printouts, even those destined for people you are seeking to impress. With photos, prints are generally about the quality I would expect from the drugstore. I noticed a loss of detail in bright areas in a couple of prints, though the most obvious flaw is that a monochrome image showed a distinct tint. The EG-3750 is not a good choice for printing black-and-white photos.

The True Cost of Bargain-Priced Ink

If we were to pick Editors' Choice printers on the basis of running costs alone, the Epson WorkForce ET-3750 EcoTank All-in-One Supertank Printer would be a shoo-in—its per-page costs are among the lowest in the business, it has a better feature set than most of its low-ink-cost rivals, and it offers good speed and above-par overall output quality. The addition of the ADF on the ET-3750 is well worth the $20 more you'll pay for it than the Epson ET-3700.

But you do pay for the ET-3750's goodness in a steep purchase price considering its lack of features such as fax capabilities, a touch screen, a port for a USB thumb drive, and a memory-card reader that you'd find in lower-price all-in-ones such as the Brother MFC-J985DW, which retains its Editors' Choice as a home-office all-in-one printer. The MFC-J985DW has a better balance between price, running costs, speed, features, and output quality. But should you be happy with a sparsely featured all-in-one with good speed and output quality, you can save a lot of money in the long run with the ET-3750—its cost per color page, a mere penny, is what you'd pay for a black-and-white page with the MFC-J985DW.

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