Epson ET-16500 EcoTank Wireless Wide format Color All-in-One Supertank Printer, Scanner, Fax & Ethernet

I work for an Advertising Agency in St.Paul and we purchased this printer for our Agency to do High Quality prints for presentations with our clients. We really liked all the features and the functionality of it is great. The issue with this printer is its print quality! It prints like a $40 printer from a garage sale. The very first print out from the ET-16500 was visibly worse then the printer we were replacing it with and our old printer was >$200. We got support from the Epson support team and they advised us to run the Print Head Nozzle Check. Our Print Heads needed cleaning so I ran the cleaning program on the printer 3 times, as advised by the tech via email. After, we tried printing again and it was back to the same quality as it was before. We have only had it for a month and we arent even half way through our ink so it just doesnt make sense that a $1000 printer out of the box does not print in good quality. The image I attached is a scanned printout of just the color blue. I find it strange that we have to clean the Print Head nozzles after only 2 weeks with only a moderate volume of printing. The image attached is better after the cleaning but you can still see lines running every inch (Look closely). Its just disappointing because the printer does have some great features. DO NOT BUY THIS PRINTER. It was a huge mistake investing in this printer and now we are working with Epson to try and get it returned or replaced. -Max G

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I bought this because we deal with multiple non-profits and print flyers for those organizations for multiple events per year. Heres my experience: 1) Software install - My printer was installed on a wired network. I have 2 windows 7 machines, a windows 10 machine, and a Mac. The windows 7 machines installed fine. The windows 10 machine gave errors 4 times and wouldnt install the networking driver, and then magically started working when I installed and tested the USB interface. I never got the Mac working other than USB. It would not connect through the network. I know the network was ok, because one of the windows 7 machines was a VM on the Mac running through the same network card. 2) Print Colors - We compared the colors with our old HP inkjet, and the HP had much better and brighter colors. 3) Paper Jams - This printer is incredibly sensitive to the exact positioning in the paper tray. If youre off by one millimeter one way or the other, it will be 3-4 sheets, then spit out a blank page and error. Unfortunately it doesnt show you that it errored, you only see it on the status on your computer. You cant complete the job either, you can only restart it from the computer. 4) INK system / Price - This is the one good thing. The ink is easily installed and you get thousands of pages. I printed a couple thousand full color flyers (not 5%) on the initial ink bottles (I never put the second set of bottles into the machine). In the end I returned the printer because I couldnt waste the time calling tech support to get the Mac drivers installed, or babysitting the print jobs to make sure that they complete and restarting them multiple times.

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I guess it kind of depends on what you are doing with a printer that determines if its the right printer for you. This is an outstanding OFFICE printer. If I were trying to do wide format, envelopes, and all that... Id get a much smaller and cheaper wide format rear load printer. So all the people whining about this printer didnt seem to understand what they were buying. After years of dealing with laser printers at the office. Expensive, big, office laser printers... Ones that always seemed to have quality issues, toner all over the place, streaks on the papers, just tons and tons of quality issues... I finally decided to try something different. First I bought a smaller EcoTank printer for my home office. It works like a champ - and if you have a small office with just yourself or just a few people, you should look at smaller/cheaper versions, too. But for my main office, we run the heck out of our laser printers. So I bought this ET-16500. Not a small investment but not that big either. A large Xerox cost multiple times more. Figured wed give this a go. It hooked up to our LAN (can also do WiFi) and I connected all the employee computers to it. It runs all day, no problem, ink has barely gone down. Every so often well be refilling ink, big deal. Youll find that refilling the ink is not messy or difficult at all. They really nailed this. We fill up both paper trays with standard 8.5" x 11" printer paper as thats all we use it for, and it truly hasnt skipped a beat. If you need a work horse office printer for quite a bit of volume, this is just so much better than the equally priced laser printer solutions. Scanning works well, too. Setup was easy, filling inks is easy, and it prints very fast, perfect quality, and we couldnt be happier. And another bonus, the Epson ink refills are totally reasonably priced (if not flat out cheap). No need to deal with the risk of off brand.

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Black ink smears and color print is not correct. Print for use in correspondence is slow. Epsons suggested a fix for ink smears doesnt work. We have only used Epson ink in this printer and the printer inkjets clog regularly even when used on a daily basis. In my opinion, this printer is not suitable for a small business environment,

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Disappointed in the inability to print borderless, and the second tray doesnt handle any kind of thicker/premium/photo paper or card. Definitely a step backwards, other than the eco-tank thing but other brands are doing that now. 11x14" is not a standard size for this printer either. Bought a brother instead...never thought Id leave Epson, but the 7620 and this convinced me to.

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It prints. At first I thought this was a great printer but after using it for quite some time I do not care for it. I love the ink tank feature but if you are looking for quality printing look somewhere else. You would think that when you pay $1000 for an ink jet printer that it would be the best you could buy but sadly it is not. Print quality is extremely bad, lines are crooked, random squiggly lines print on the page, print is fuzzy. I have cleaned the heads, did the updates and still the print quality is awful. It is so bad that I cannot use it to print anything that I have to share. I use a 6 year old HP Laserjet for the handouts. I use this expensive ink printer for the junk that we print internally and nothing else. Oh and by the way I am an IT professional with over 27 years in this field so I have seen plenty of printers in my career, trust me if you want quality printing stay away from this printer.

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Very disappointed! I paid a $1000 for this printer and have owned it for verily a year. I definitely would never do that again. The print quality has never been anywhere near as great as stated. I was expecting an exceptional product, especially for the price. It frequently gives and error message that says "Operation is invalid," making it not print. Recently there has been an ink issue too. There are parts of the page that wont print correctly, leaving lines and distorting the text or photo. This is extremely frustrating when trying to print documents for taxes. I also get a message on the screen that says the ink level is low. I know this message is not correct because the tanks are almost completely full. It still is using ink with very poor quality, but says there isnt any ink in the tanks. I have done the clean print head test multiple times, hoping it would resolve at least part of the issue. Unfortunately Ive had no luck whatsoever. I run my own Photography Business and I have not been impressed with this product. I originally purchased this product because of the ink efficiency and large paper size I could potentially print for customers. I not only paid an extreme amount of money to purchase the printer, but now I have lost money because it will not do what the manufacturer says it would do. Its likely I will go back to an HP Printer, as I have never had print quality be an issue with HP in the past. Not impressed!! I give this product 1 star.

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I was alarmed by the number of one-star reviews, most pointing out "streaking", but Ive been working with Epson professional printers since the mid 1990s and hoped these reports were due to 3rd party ink and/or bad paper. I learned what this was only a few hours after setting it up: the ink is quite wet and certain paper (especially semi-gloss or glossy, even that made for inkjet) expands under heavy ink saturation. Essentially, the coating designed to soak the ink up expands like a sponge, this curls the paper upward where the print head begins rubbing against it streaking the still-wet ink. The front rollers are extremely jam-prone, even the slightest curl or defect in the leading edge of a page causes the page to fold, tear, and/or jam. The print head also has a tendency to tear the edge of the page if it doesnt hit the front rollers exactly right. This can be solved by different paper or a wider margin at the top of the page, but it should be solvable with a firmware update: since the ink dries over a few seconds and the paper is only curled while wet, if the first few inches print slower itd mitigate the paper curling. Once the paper is under the front rollers beyond the print head itll remain taught regardless to how wet it becomes. MacOSX has pretty decent drivers. The Android app is barely usable and has very few print options, Epsons Linux drivers are pretty much unusable.

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This printer has been nothing but a disappointment. First, it is slow, slow to start printing once prompted and slow to print. 2nd, it does not print 2 sided unless it is on plain white paper. 3rd, we received it Jan 2018 and it already squeaks loud. 4th, when printing envelopes, I will select "Print envelope" on the printer and also on the computer print screen and yet I have to go to the printer before each envelope is printed because the printer tell me that the paper does not match what I have selected on the print screen. We bought this printer through amazon, we have tried to return it, but were told to contact Epson. We have, at least 4 times. They say they cant refund because we bought it from Amazon and Amazon says we have to deal with Epson. First, a representative told us to ask Epson for a letter stating that they would not accept a return because it was bought from Amazon and to send them the letter and then we could return it. Once we got the letter from Epson, an Amazon rep said we could not return it. All this has taken hours of our business time. Never again will I buy from Amazon.

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I do a fair amount of hobby printing on 11x17 and larger paper sizes. I was willing to spend, but not a ridiculous amount. So when I was looking for a printer to support that, this wasnt just the top of the list--it was the only real contender. As a result, I bought an ET-16500 a bit over a year ago. Unfortunately, thats when the fun started. The first printer didnt work--a belt was slipping in a way that it really shouldnt. Epson shipped off a replacement--but because the purchase was over $500, they determined that this was a business printer, not a consumer printer, and required not only a signature but that someone be home to receive it. The boxes for the printer dont even fit in my car! I couldnt just pick it up from the depot. And Epson was unwilling to change that policy, no matter how often I asked. So that was a day I had to take off of work. Then, THAT printer didnt work. Finally, a third printer failed. The fourth was finally the charm, but I had to pay almost $60 a return to ship Epson the dead printers back that they shipped me. It added up to nearly 20% over the purchase price, plus I had to spend nearly a week at home waiting for printers to either be picked up or dropped off. Flash forward to a year later. Weve been really happy with the printer--now that its working, its amazing. But were just barely out of the warranty period and the black is printing with severe banding. Where Im printing text, its blurry--something is smudging it the ink. I call Epson, and its a hardware problem--out of warranty, theres nothing they can do. Im offered 15% off the Epson store, but that brings it down to Amazons price, and Id have to take yet another day off of work to accept the printer. I live in a major city and theres no service partner in said major city--the printer and I are going to have to go on a road trip if I want someone to look at it. Thatll be fun, since youre told in no uncertain terms not to jolt or tip this printer in any way once theres ink inside. Epsons support for this printer is basically consumer-class support: theyve got a simple script they work through for the most common problems and if its not on the script, then its basically "hardware failure" and its done. The folks working the support desk are nice enough; I should know, since Ive probably spent 10 or 15 hours on the phone with them over the past year. Once, just once, I got through to second-tier support and they were excellent. But Epsons support scripts and policies are absolutely minimal, more befitting of one of those cheapo $25 printers you buy for the ink cartridges and discard after six months. For this kind of an investment, they should be doing better. Theyre not. Im basically the perfect person for this printer. I dont care if the print quality isnt exactly photo-printer quality. I wanted a large format color printer with laser-printer prices per page. Even so, even if youre in exactly my boat, I cant recommend the ET-16500. Ownership of this thing has been a nightmare and Epsons support for it has the worst of both the consumer and corporate worlds. Save yourself some sanity, and spend an extra grand on a better printer.

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