Epson L6490 Printer Review – This Multi-Function Printer for Small and Home offices has tons of options

Getting the right printer for your printing requirement can be tricky. I have seen many who are having a small business setup, grabbing a home printer only to face problems later. It’s not that the home use printers are bad, but they are mainly catered to very small volume printing needs. You should know your monthly duty cycle before you decide to buy a printer. The monthly duty cycle is the maximum number of pages a printer can print per month without breaking it down. Pushing it further is straining your printer capacity. If are looking for a monthly duty cycle of a maximum of 33,000 pages, plus a multifunction printer that comes with automatic duplex printing, scan and copier, wireless connectivity and even Fax thrown in, here is the Epson L6490 tailor-made for your needs. In this Epson L6490 Printer Review, I try to help you make the right buying decision for your printing needs.

Box contents:

• Printer
• Power Cable and USB Cable
• Ink Bottles – (1x 127ml BK, 3x 70ml CMY) , Extra Black
• User manual, Quick Setup Guide, warranty card

Epson L6490 Design

Most printers come as a monolithic block but L6490 has a refreshing design. It has very good aesthetics and has a modern design appeal. The print and copier/scanner bed has a good amount of separation between them, with the copious paper output zone dividing them. The printer has a dimension of 44 x 41 x 42 Centimeters, an almost square design. At 7.3 kg, it is slightly on the heavier side, but once kept at its place, very rarely the printers are moved around. . The build quality and finish are good.

Like most eco tank/ink tank models, refilling the ink is convenient and easy. You just need to open the tray and place the ink bottle head into the respective grooves for a spill-free refilling.

There is a large cassette tray that holds up to 250 papers.

The rear has an additional tray, suppose you need to stack photo papers instead of opening the front tray.

Epson EcoTank L6490 Features

This is a multi-function printer – so it can print, scan, copy and also work as a fax machine. While you can run it with the touch control panel on board, it also supports Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Ethernet, mobile connectivity.

It is equipped with a 2.4-inch LCD touch screen. The touch experience is not that smooth, don’t expect fluid touch like you get on your mobile phones. The screen, gets the job done though. There is standard power and home buttons on the side of the screen. It also provides an animated tutorial to guide you through.

Wifi connectivity is pretty straight forward and once connected to your local network you can easily shoot prints from your smartphones and computers, which is what I did when I was testing the printer.

The EcoTank L6490 supports mono as well as colour printing. It uses pigment dyes. The printer is more for document printing, and not for photo printing. You can print photos but this machine is not made for photo print in mind., Being a pigment dye machine, the printed documents have Longer lasting print and better colour stability. The inks are also more smudge and water resistant.

Epson EcoTank L6490 Printing Speed & Performance

Here is the list of paper formats the printer supports: 9 x 13cm, 10 x 15cm, 13 x 18cm, 13 x 20cm, 20 x 25cm, 100 x 148mm, 16:9, Letter Legal, No. 10 (Envelope), DL (Envelope), C6 (Envelope), B5 (17.6 x 25.7cm), A6 (10.5 x 14.8cm), A4 (21.0 x 29.7cm), and A5 (14.8 x 21.0cm).

It offers duplex printing, which is very convenient with an automatic document feeder. For starters, the Epson L6490 offers three printing modes.

1. Draft Mode: Ideal for testing page layout before printing the final copy. This is the fastest, but lowest-quality mode on most printers. Apart from testing and measuring print speeds, Draft Mode can be used to print low-priority documents such as grocery lists.
2. Standard Mode: This is the default setting for most printers. It offers a balance between quality and speed that works fine for most printing needs.
3. High-Quality Mode: If you want to squeeze out the best possible quality from your printer, this is the setting to opt for. However, the quality improvement comes at the cost of print speeds

Black and White printing

When it comes to speed, for a single page printout it took 7 seconds in monochrome Draft Mode. The standard mode takes around 9 seconds, whereas it shoots up to 24 seconds in High-Quality Mode.

And now let’s take a look at the PPM or Pages Per Minuter, you can expect around 22 pages in Monochrome Draft Mode, 16 pages in the Standard Mode and if you are opting for all our high-quality prints, it takes a bit of time churning 2 prints per minute.

Color Printing

Here, it takes around 9 seconds for Draft, 14 seconds for Standard Mode, and 46 seconds for High.

Talking about PPM, on draft mode, the printer’s color print output is 9 pages per minute. In Standard Mode, you get 7 pages per minute. In High-Quality Mode, it prints one full image in a minute.

Overall, it was in my expected lines for multifunction printer speed. The print quality is good, the texts are sharp even in standard mode, the standard mode I feel would suffice for most printing requirements.

Copier and Scanner

The L6490’s flatbed scanner uses a Contact Image Sensor (CIS) and an LED light source to deliver great results. The 300dpi setting is good enough to scan documents. For images, 600dpi is a sweet spot. There’s also a software-based 1200dpi mode, which slightly improves the scan quality, but is painfully slow. Scanning a monochrome chart takes 9 seconds to scan at 300dpi, 15 seconds at 600dpi, and a whopping five minutes at 1,200dpi.

Epson EcoTank L6490 Print Cost

This was the Eco tank print economy kick. in. Since the machine does not use ink cartridges and uses refillable ink tanks, the effective running costs come down. As per Epson, the 70ml black ink bottle has a yield of up to 6,000 pages. Epson also offers a 127ml version that can print up to 7,500 monochrome pages. The remaining Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow ink bottles have a composite yield of 6,000 pages. The refill bottles are very affordable, the black ink bottle costs ₹309, whereas the colour ones are pegged at ₹449 each in India.

Epson L6490 Printer Verdict

When I checked Amazon, as on the date am writing this review, the Epson Ecotank L6490 is available for ₹29,688. It is a versatile multifunction printer that offers colour print, copier, scanner and fax functionality along with a plethora of wired and wireless connectivity options. The automatic duplex printing is convenient, anytime. If you are not looking at photo printing, this would be an ideal printer for a small business and home office setup.

Pros of Epson Ecotank L6490

• Modern design, looks good.
• Good build quality.
• Great for printing documents
• Plenty of connectivity options
• Duplex printing support
• Low printing cost
• Large voluminous printing tray

Cons of Epson EcoTank L6490

• Not ideal for photo printing