Aimed at home and micro offices, the $499.99 Epson EcoTank Wireless ET-4850 All-in-One is the top-of-the line letter- and legal-size printer in Epson's latest batch of EcoTank all-in-one printers (not to be confused with the EcoTank Pro line). In its compact size, features, and performance, the ET-4850 is roughly equivalent to the much less expensive Editors' Choice–winning Brother MFC-J4335DW, but the Brother uses cartridges, whereas the ET-4850's key draw is low-cost ink. If you don't print much, the Brother printer will be the better option, but if you do, the ET-4850 will be a bargain in the long run. That makes it our new Editors' Choice for heavy-duty personal and home-office use.

All the Features You Probably Need

Like most AIOs, the ET-4850 prints, scans, and works as a standalone copier and fax machine. You can also send faxes from your computer using Epson's fax utility or almost any Windows program by printing to the ET-4850 fax driver. The Epson ScanSmart app lets you scan to online services, including Evernote; save the scan as a file, including with a cloud destination; or attach it to an email.

Paper handling for printing is well suited for personal to micro-office use, thanks to a 250-sheet drawer and support for automatic double-sided printing (duplexing). Epson suggests a monthly duty cycle of up to 800 pages, or 40 pages per weekday, which is a realistic level for the capacity. However, note that there's no single-sheet bypass tray. If you occasionally need to print on letterhead or other special-purpose paper, you'll have to load it in the paper drawer first. In comparison, the Brother MFC-J4335DW has a lower capacity but adds the convenience of a bypass tray.

Paper handling for scanning, copying, and faxing is a little disappointing for the price. A 30-page ADF supplements the letter-size flatbed and can handle legal-size paper. However, the ADF does not scan both sides of the page, and there's no support for manual duplexing, which would let you flip the stack over, scan the second side, and automatically interfile the pages in the right order. Although this won't be an issue for everyone, it could rule out the printer (along with much of its competition in this price range) if you need to scan or copy two-sided documents.

Small Enough to Share Your Desk

Available in either black or white, the ET-4850 is compact enough to fit on your desk comfortably, so you can easily reach the paper tray or enter scan, copy, and fax commands using its 2.4-inch front-panel, a color touch screen. It weighs just 14.8 pounds and measures 10.0 by 16.4 by 19.8 inches (HWD) with the ADF and output trays fully extended.

Connection choices include USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct. For my performance tests, I connected by Ethernet. For Android or iOS mobile printing, Epson's Smart Panel app lets you print from or scan to your mobile devices as well as set up and monitor the printer. And, like most current Epson printers, the ET-4850 supports Epson Email Print and Epson Remote print, which let you send files to the printer via the internet.

Installation is simple, thanks to a well designed installation utility. Epson includes a disc that will check online for the latest software; you can also go to Epson's website to download apps and drivers.

One small issue is that the installation takes you through a manual alignment process that requires spotting small differences in a series of print samples. This could be done automatically by having you place the sample on the scan bed so the AIO could pick the best one.

Sufficient Speed, Excellent Quality

The ET-4850's performance ratings aren't impressive for the price, at 15.5ppm for monochrome black pages and 8.5ppm for color, but it delivered respectable performance compared with similarly priced inkjet tank printers and some less-expensive cartridge printers.

In my tests using our standard testbed, the ET-4850 came in at 13.8ppm (52 seconds) for monochrome text, using our 12-page Word file and including the first page. On our business applications suite, which includes color output, it came in at 7.5ppm (3 minutes 20 seconds). For 4-by-6-inch photos, it averaged 1 minute 25 seconds per photo, using Epson's Premium Photo Paper Glossy.

This makes the ET-4850 essentially tied with the less-expensive cartridge-based Brother MFC-J4335DW, which printed black text at 14.7ppm (49 seconds). However, both are noticeably slower than the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7840 and  WF-7820, two cartridge-based models that can print up to supertabloid size and cost more than the Brother printer but less than the ET-4850. The two WorkForce models were essentially tied with each other at roughly 20ppm (24 seconds).

On our business applications suite, which includes color pages, the ET-4850 was slower than any of the cartridge-based AIOs. We clocked both the WF-7820 and WF-7840 at about 12 ppm (2 minutes 5 seconds) and the MFC-J4335DW at 10.5ppm (2 minutes 23 seconds).

See How We Test PrintersSee How We Test Printers

Text and graphics output quality was just short of top tier for business inkjets. Edges on characters weren't quite a match for laser-printer crispness, but all the fonts in our tests that are likely to be used in standard business documents were highly readable at 5 points, except for one italic font that was highly readable at 6 points. For one of the heavily stylized fonts in our tests, loops and spaces between characters tended to fill in, making even 10-point text hard to read. A similar but less-demanding font was easily readable at 8 points.

Graphics showed subtle banding in fills with the default settings, but colors were nicely saturated, and thin lines held up well, including a one-pixel-wide line on a black background. Photos on the recommended paper were at the low end of drugstore quality. I saw a blue-green shift that was particularly noticeable on a black-and-white photo.

On our smudging tests, which consist of putting a few drops of water on output printed at least 24 hours earlier and gently wiping it off, both black and color ink did an excellent job resisting smudging, both on plain paper and on the recommended photo paper. However, I saw water stains on a color graphic where I left drops to dry.

A Seriously Low Cost Per Page

Thanks to the refillable tanks, the ink cost per page for the ET-4850 works out to just 0.3 cent for a standard black page and 0.9 cent for color. Compared with the Brother MFC-J4335DW, that's a savings of 0.6 cent per black page and 3.6 cents per color page, or $6 per 1000 text pages and $36 per 1000 color pages. As always, keep in mind that the number that matters is the total cost of ownership, meaning the initial price plus the running cost for the number of pages you expect to print. You'll need to do the math to see which printer will actually be cheaper in the long run.

If you don't expect to print enough pages for ink price to matter, consider the Editors' Choice–winning MFC-J4335DW for its low initial cost. Alternatively, if you want faster speed and more flexible paper handling, consider the Epson WF-7820, which has two paper trays, or the WF-7840, which has three. Both can handle up to supertabloid-size paper, and the extra trays let you keep multiple types of paper loaded at once.

The niche for the ET-4850 is home offices that print a lot and need AIO features. It's a close match to the MFC-J4335DW for features, and with sufficient use, it will give you a lower total cost of ownership. That combination makes it worth of an Editors' Choice award.