Pros & Cons
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- Very low running costs
- Terrific print quality
- Auto-duplexing ADF
- PrecisionCore 4S printhead
- Excellent mobile connectivity options
- Two-year warranty with registration
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- High initial purchase price
Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850 Specs
| Automatic Document Feeder | |
| Color or Monochrome | Color |
| Connection Type | Bluetooth |
| Connection Type | Ethernet |
| Connection Type | USB |
| Connection Type | Wireless |
| Cost Per Page (Color) | 2 cents |
| Cost Per Page (Monochrome) | 2 cents |
| Duplexing Scans | |
| LCD Preview Screen | |
| Maximum Scan Area | Legal |
| Maximum Standard Paper Size | Legal |
| Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) | 66,000 pages per month |
| Monthly Duty Cycle (Recommended) | 3,300 |
| Number of Ink Cartridges/Tanks | 4 |
| Number of Ink Colors | 4 |
| Print Duplexing | |
| Printer Input Capacity | 550 |
| Printing Technology | Inkjet |
| Rated Speed at Default Settings (Color) | 25 ppm |
| Rated Speed at Default Settings (Mono) | 25 ppm |
| Scanner Optical Resolution | 1,200 by 2,400 pixels per inch |
| Scanner Type | Flatbed with ADF (Standard or Optional) |
| Standalone Copier and Fax | Copier |
| Standalone Copier and Fax | Fax |
| Type | All-in-one |
The Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850 ($849.99) is an all-in-one printer designed to churn out 3,000 to 4,000 pages per month in today's busy small and midsize offices and workgroups. A letter- and legal-size version of the wide-format Editors' Choice EcoTank Pro ET-16650, the ET-5850's high input capacity, relatively high volume ratings, excellent print quality, low running costs, and a strong lineup of productivity and convenience features make it a shoo-in as our current favorite midrange color AIO printer. And an awesome bonus? If you buy it by March 31, 2021, it comes with unlimited reimbursement for two years' free ink.
EcoTank Pro: Power- and Productivity-Packed
Currently, Epson has four EcoTank Pro offerings, which include the ET-16650 mentioned above and a slightly lesser-endowed (in terms of color print and copy speeds) wide-format model, the ET-16600. The letter- and legal-size models are the ET-5850 tested here and the ET-5880, which adds HP Printer Command Language (PCL) and Adobe PostScript page description language (PDL) support.
PCL and PostScript are, of course, the page description languages used in many typesetting, printing, publishing, and graphics design environments, and PostScript is also the native language of Adobe's state-of-the-art graphics design software, Illustrator, as well as the code Adobe Acrobat uses to "draw" or define PDF pages.
In other words, if you plan to use your in-house printer for producing prepress proofs, or perhaps even short runs of brochures and other marketing material, spending the additional $50 or so for PCL and PostScript emulation is certainly advisable. Besides, while writing this, I found the ET-5880 on sale at Epson's online store and elsewhere for $50 lessthan the ET-5850.
In any case, given its slender build of 16.7 by 19.7 by 18.1 inches (HWD) and tidy 39.2 pounds, the EcoTank Pro ET-5850 packs a lot of wallop into a relatively small footprint compared to competing inkjet and midrange color laser AIOs. It's close in size, for example, to Brother's MFC-J5945DW, a rival midrange color inkjet AIO, and about 21 pounds lighter than Lexmark's MC2535adwe, a medium-volume color laser AIO that's another PCMag top pick.
If smaller and lighter is what you need, though, you may want to step down to a leaner all-in-one such as, say, HP's OfficeJet Pro 9015, yet another PCMag Editors' Choice. Meanwhile, let's return to the ET-5850 and its robust feature set—starting with its 50-page, single-pass auto-duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF) for sending two-sided multipage documents to the scanner. "Single-pass" means that the ADF deploys two sensors, one for each page side, making it capable of capturing both sides simultaneously.
(unknown)Most competing models, including those mentioned here so far, come with auto-duplexing ADFs. Some, such as the OfficeJet Pro 9015 with its 35-sheet feeder, hold fewer originals, while others, such as the Lexmark I just mentioned, come with reverse-duplexing ADFs (with just one sensor, so the device processes one side, then reverses and flips the paper to process the other).
Reverse-duplexing isn't as fast or efficient as single-pass, but in the long run they both get the job done. In any case, setup, making copies, scanning to network and cloud storage, configuring security options, generating and printing usage reports, and more are all handled from the ET-5850's spacious 4.3-inch color touch screen control panel.
(unknown)As you can see above, the display comprises the entire panel. You also get, as you do with any business-oriented AIO these days, an onboard web portal that provides access to all operational and configuration tasks from virtually any desktop, laptop, or handheld web browser.
Like the other EcoTank Pro AIOs, the ET-5850's paper capacity is 550 sheets from three separate sources—two 250-sheet cassettes and a 50-sheet multipurpose tray that pulls up and out from the back of the machine, as shown in the image below.
(unknown)The HP 9015 holds just 250 sheets from one input source, as does the Lexmark MC2535adwe, though the latter also has a one-sheet override tray and can be expanded to a total of 1,451 sheets. The Brother MFC-J5945DW holds 600 sheets from three sources, and the Epson WF-C5790supports 330 sheets (expandable to 830) from two input trays.
Also like the other three EcoTank Pros, the ET-5850's maximum monthly duty cycle is 66,000 pages, with a recommended monthly print volume of 3,300 prints—one of the highest among the other midrange color AIOs discussed here. The Lexmark, at 85,000 maximum and 8,500 recommended, is the highest, and the OfficeJet Pro 9015, with a 25,000-print duty cycle and 2,500-page recommended volume, is the lowest.
Copious Connectivity
When it comes to connecting computing devices and cloud sites, Epson left little to chance. The hardware interfaces are Ethernet (up to 100Mbps), connecting to a single PC via USB, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, and Bluetooth BLE (Bluetooth Lite Edition). Those last two provide peer-to-peer connections that allow you to connect your smartphones and tablets to the printer without either it or them being part of the same network.
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(unknown)You also get Apple AirPrint, Mopria, and a slew of options, such as Email Print, Scan to Cloud, Remote Printer Driver, and several others via Epson Connect, plus the Epson iPrint Mobile App for printing from and scanning directly to your iOS or Android handheld.
Fast Enough
Epson rates the ET-5850 at a moderate but adequate 25 pages per minute (ppm). To determine how well it measured up against the other midrange color AIOs we've reviewed lately, I connected the EcoTank Pro via Ethernet to our standard Intel Core i5 testbed running Windows 10 Pro and clocked it as it printed our collection of test documents. (See how we test printers.)
The first round of tests entailed printing a 12-page Microsoft Word text document several times and averaging the results. Here, the ET-5850 exceeded its rating with an average score of 28.7ppm. That's 8.7ppm faster than Brother's MFC-J5945DW, 6.7ppm faster than HP's OfficeJet Pro 9015, 2.3ppm quicker than the Epson WF-C5790, and 11.9ppm behind the Lexmark MC2535adwe.
Next, I timed the ET-5850 as it cranked out our suite of color and complex business documents consisting of Adobe Acrobat PDFs, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, charts, and graphs, and several full-page PowerPoint handouts made up of both simple and intricate graphics and multiple fonts varying in type, size, and colors.
I combined these scores with those from printing the 12-page text document to come up with an average of 18.3ppm for printing our entire collection of test documents. This score came within a few tenths of a ppm of the results achieved by the Lexmark and Epson WorkForce AIOs; the HP 9015 fell behind by about 3ppm and the Brother by about 7ppm.
Finally, I timed and averaged the ET-5850's results as it printed our colorful, detailed 4-by-6-inch test snapshots. It took 10 seconds apiece, about average among the printers mentioned here (and many others), although the MC2535adwe took four times as long.
PrecisionCore Heat-Free Ink Chips
Like Epson's WorkForce Pro printers, EcoTank Pro machines feature the company's PrecisionCore 4S Heat-Free printhead that utilizes two ink chips with tiny, densely clustered nozzles. Precision Core 4S (and to a somewhat lesser degree 2S) printheads produce impressive detail and brilliant, accurate colors.
The ET-5850's text is near typesetter quality down to the smallest font legible without magnification (in my case about 10 points), which is more than acceptable for most business-document output. Also, the full-page graphics and handout pages I printed came out with no readily noticeable ink-distribution flaws. Colors were more than accurate enough to avoid unsightly color shifts, and details such as hairlines thinner than 1 point were unbroken from end to end.
Photos looked good, too, and the ET-5850 supports borderless output on prints up to legal-size (8.5 by 14 inches). Many documents (especially photos) take on an appearance of higher professionalism when borderless output is used creatively (and, well, properly). The ET-5850 should make your business correspondence look good.
Color Pages for 2 Cents
Currently, and for a while into the future, the company is offering two years of unlimited free ink with the purchase of an EcoTank Pro AIO. By giving you all-you-can-eat ink for the first two years you own the printer, Epson has not only one-upped the competition, but greatly increased the units' value. Starting with the third year, the ET-5850's running costs come out to about 2 cents per page for both monochrome and color pages, which isn't too shabby, either. As I said about the ET-16650, the ET-5850's black page cost is not an earth-shaker; it's competitive with most entry-level to midrange color laser and some inkjet AIOs. But that 2 cents per color page easily offsets the monochrome running costs.
(unknown)Two years of unlimited ink is hard to beat, and, depending on how much you print, can reduce the overall cost of ownership significantly. By comparison, the Brother MFC-J5945DW's running costs are just under 1 cent for monochrome pages and just under 5 cents for color, while the HP 9015 (with a subscription to its $10-monthly Instant Ink program) prints at about 3.5 cents for both black and color. The Epson WF-C5790's running costs are 1.6 cents monochrome and 6.4 cents color.
(unknown)It's also important to note that several other EcoTank AIOs, including the Editors' Choice ET-4760, print both monochrome and color pages for under a penny per page. But their volume, capacity, and feature sets pale in comparison to EcoTank Pro machines.