Epson – Tech Raman

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

Lakshmi — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 05:25:32 +0000

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.

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.
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.
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

Epson M1120 EcoTank Monochrome Wi-Fi Ink Tank Printer Review

Lakshmi Rajan — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 12:55:44 +0000

Epson L4160 and boldly claimed it could very well be the printer you might want for your home needs. Well, Epson sends another printer to me but this one is for a different set of needs. This is not for your home but for small office needs well, not exactly for every small office too. Confused? Go ahead read my Epson EcoTank M1120 review. Article last updated: June 22

What is Epson M1120?

The M1120 is a straight forward single-minded inkjet printer that does one job – print in mono at low costs. Yes, in the world of all-in-one’s this is a simpleton and Epson targets this more for a small office that would need volumes of text prints.

Epson M1120 Specs

Epson M1120 Design

Space is premium and when it comes to small office its super premium. There is always something vying for that extra space. Keeping that in mind, the M1120 has a compact form that can fit easily in any space of the office. This is why you also have both the feeder tray and the output tray in the front instead of having the output tray at the top. So, the Epson M1120 can squeeze into a cabinet shelve with minimum height. Of course, there is a top lid which opens up to the inside printer belly but you might not have a need to open it unless you have to do a refill which would not be a frequent affair or you got a problem in there. Talking about the refill, its a very easy process – open – fill – shut. Of course, you need to press a button on the top which initiates the am-ready-to-be-fed position. Clear instructions are given on the inside lid which makes it an easy job. Well, I made it sound easier but am sure first time you might struggle a bit since the Epson’s manual is terribly bad at basic instructions. The top has the buttons stacked. There are only two ports on the printer. One USB cable that connects to your computer and another power cable.

Performance of Epson M1120

Wifi connectivity was not an issue and you can use the Epson iPrint app for that purpose on Play Store or iOS. I had connected to my PC since all my printing needs are stored there. It also supports Epson email print, Remote Print drive, Google Cloud print etc. Epson talks about a speed of 15 pages per minute for the M1120, and it does live up to that claim. Epson also says the printing ink is water resistant. So you don’t have to worry about water smudges on the printed paper. I liberally made use of volumes of pending printing jobs I had on this and the print was good enough. Test results of the graphs and charts on greyscale printing was adequate too. The main advantage of the printer is the low cost per print – its 12 paise per print which for a small office makes monetary sense. For warranty, Epson offers warranty coverage of up to 3 years or 50,000 prints, whichever comes first. Having said that the printer is not without disadvantages, the main being lack of automatic duplex printing. I was printing a 100-page book and badly missed the feature. Of course, this does not have colour printing capability nor has the extra niceties like scanner and copier.

Epson M1120 vs Mono Laser printers

Cost wise how does the Epson M1120 compares with mono laser printers? Epson claims their new models with EcoTank are cost effective. With a printing cost of 12 paise per print, the new Epson EcoTank M series printers make printing 23 times lower as compared to mono laser printers, which cost Rs. 2.74 per print with original toners as per Epson. The refill ink bottles provide an ultra-high page yield of up to 6,000 pages per bottle as against laser printers that provide an original toner yield of just 2,000 pages per toner. Additionally, Epson claims the printers are designed keeping in mind the UN Sustainable development goals. With their refill ink bottles offerting up to 6000 pages per bottle, there is less need for frequent change of toners and theyby helping the businesses in significanly reducing the carbon footprint. Also, the Epson Monochrome EcoTank printers consume just 14w of power as compared to 250w consumed by mono laser printers. This translates into over 17 times lesser power consumption.

Should you buy Epson M1120?

I have a small home office and the Epson M1120 does not fit into my scheme of things. I need an all in one colour printer and Epson does offer a choice in that. But if your printing needs are blacks and whites and you can do away with automatic duplex advantage, then you can consider this but make sure to decide based on your long term needs. ]]>

Epson L4160 Multi function Printer – What Every Home Needs

Lakshmi Rajan — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 11:03:51 +0000

What is Epson L4160? Epson L4160 is a multi function printer for home users who don’t necessarily need the fastest print speeds or the business-oriented features. It’s ideal for those who typically worry about printing costs whenever they print, be it family photos, recipes, or the kids’ homework – it can print, copy and scan. It can print, copy and scanat just 12 paise for Black and 20 paise for colour prints and as I figured out for a small office like mine with limited printing needs, this works well. The printer is duplex enabled meaning it can take automatic two-sided printing up to A4 size and also has copy functions supporting up to 99 copies. You can also print photos on max quality on a glossy photo sheet. It uses ink tank refill instead of snap-in cartridges. It also sports a 100-sheet paper input tray (or 20 sheets of photo paper) and supports both duplex and borderless printing. USB, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct connectivity are all onboard, and you can also print directly from the built-in SD card slot.

Epson L4160 Specifications:

Epson L4160 Design:

The L4160 is a compact all-in-one compact printer. You will immediately feel and find (later during your use) it is well built. The paper intake is at the back and when it not use, it can be closed which also prevents dust from entering the system. The left side has a USB port to connect to your computer and a little to the back there is the power cable port. The front has an SD card slot, in case you want to print directly from your memory card. The top portion can be easily lifted to take a peek at inside as well as for refilling. Everything is quite easy to use with no loose ends. The front panel has the power on/off button and a home button. There is a 1.4″ color display panel but it is not touch enabled. The control panel can be tilted towards up, in case you choose to stand and do the printing job. The buttons on the panel are easily accessible and have a nice click to them which is nice and reassuring. With the buttons, you can navigate through the settings on the panel. Except for typing the alphabets and numbers during the setting up the WiFi which was a bit daunting scroll through of the letters and numbers, navigation otherwise is easy to do for your daily functions. The top panel can be lifted giving you a glimpse of the internals. This is the ink tank and it is easy to access it. You can open the individual tank nozzle point and refill them with the ink bottle is a piece of cake. Just open, pour and shut case. The front side has a level indicator for the colors. The flatbed scanner is on top and has no ADF for copying and scanning but the flatbed serves the home use purposes where we don’t do volumes.

Advantages of Epson L4160

Epson L4160 is a compact inkjet printer. It is easy to set up, I had no difficulties connecting to my system. Moreover, it also has cloud printing support and can connect to your WiFi network for remote operations. Of course, the easiest way is to connect via the USB port and the cable you get along with the box, which is a no-nonsense affair. There is no need to even install any drivers, though you get a CD along with the box. The convenient part is to connect the printer to your WiFi and all the devices connected to the network will be able to use the printer. Trust me, it is more useful and your family members won’t be bothering you to get the print done. The L4160 also supports WiFi Direct connectivity which ensures that the printer is only available to the devices you manfully set it up with. Google Cloud Print and Apple AirPrint are also supported. So the L4160 offers a whole lot of connectivity option for printing at your convenience. One of the key advantages of the L4160 is it’s an Ink tank printer. It’s convenient for refilling as well as economical. You get 4 refill bottles and it can easily be poured in for a refill in their respective color tanks. The refill bottles are also comparatively cheaper and you can get the color bottle for around Rs 300 each or less if you buy together all the BK, Y, M, C colors together. the nozzle of each ink bottles is unique and will only fit its own color ink tank. The ink only flows when the correct bottle is inserted into the correct ink tank – so no spills!

The cost advantage of Epson L4160

Cost per page for black print is 12 paisa and for the color, it is 20 paisa. One Black bottle will give you up to 7,500 prints and the Color bottles (all 3 combined) will give you up to 6,000 prints. The price might be little higher if you print photos on photo sheets, still, it would work out to be cheaper than the traditional printers.

And the Epson Creative Print App for the new generation

The printer comes with an Epson Creative Print app, which lets you customize and share photos with personal messages. Creative Print can also access and print Facebook photos, create collages with photos from Instagram and mobile devices, as well as create custom greeting cards.

Should you consider Epson L4160 printer?

Absolutely yes. Do note the initial purchase cost of the printer is a bit higher and there are cheaper options available including from Epson. So why should you buy this? The long-term running cost of the printer would be cheaper. If your printing needs are decently good and you want to invest in one good printer for a long run for your home or small office, this should be an ideal choice. Plus, with a multitude of connectivity options, it is super convenient for our fast lifestyle. You also don’t have to worry about the inks getting dried up in a short duration even for few weeks you might not be using it. The Epson L4160 is available for around Rs 17,000 in the Indian market.]]>

Epson WorkForce WF-100 Review : Portable and Wireless On the Go Printer

Lakshmi Rajan — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 09:45:57 +0000

Epson WorkForce WF-100 | The Specs Printer Type: InkJet Dimensions: 12.2″ x 9.1″ x 8.5″ (30.99 cm x 23.11 cm x 21.59 cm) Weight: 1.59 Kg Charging : Micro-USB and an AC port. Power: AC (100-220v) , USB 5V USB 2.0 Charging time: 2.5 hours via AC ; USB connection with 1.5A take 2.5 hours and 0.5A takes 10 hours. Battery life: 100 B&W pages / 50 color pages. Cartridges: 1 Black and 1 CMYK Print time: When using AC adapter B&W @ 6.7 ISP ppm and Color @ 3.8 ISO ppm. When using battery power, B&W @ 3.5 ISO ppm and Color @ 2.0 ISO ppm. Printing size range: 8.5″ x 14″ to No. 10 envelope plain paper

What is Epson WorkForce WF – 100 Printer? For Whom Is It?

Every gadgets tends to get smaller these days, more easier to carry around. Plus, go wireless is the mantra. While almost every printer manufacturer can say ‘honey I have shrunk a printer’ in my portfolio, Epson has take a step ahead by not only shrinking the WorkForce WF-100 for portability but also has gone wireless with it. Yes, the Epson WorkForce WF -100 has a built-in battery plus it supports WiFi and WiFi direct for wireless printing. If you are someone constantly on the go and have some real good need to print very often, the Epson WorkForce WF-100 might be for you. You can throw it in your bag, take it along with you and push the documents wirelessly from your Smartphone, laptop in style and not scramble for cables or power sockets!

Epson WorkForce WF – 100 | Design

Imagine an Encyclopedia hardcover book, split it vertically into two halves, and you get a fair idea of how the Epson WorkForce WF-100 dimension might be. Very lighter for a printer and easy to carry around like a book. At 1.59 kg, no one could crib about its weight. The printer is all black in affair with a textured black matte finish to it. There is the Epson branding on the top and a steel plate to lift the top lid at the front. What I really liked about the portable design is that the front and the top can be stepped back to transform into a paper feed tray. The pages feed out directly and churns out from the front. No extra attachments nor any clumsy holders. Pretty neat integration. When you uncover the top lid that folds up into a paper tray, the top surface of the printer features a 1.8-inch color LCD display which is not often seen in this portable segment. It makes use of a four way rocker switch for navigating the menus and a OK button. Apart from these there is a power button and a cancel button which is indicated with a red circle containing a triangle that can cancel the print in progress or queued. That’s all the buttons you get in the entire printer.

Epson WorkForce WF – 100 | Battery

As I mentioned earlier, the WF-100 can work with the traditional power cable or from a built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery. The battery can be charged either by AC power which is the quickest way to juice up the battery or from a computer over a USB cable when the printer is turned off or in sleep mode. It takes almost 2.5 hours to fully charge.

Epson WorkForce WF – 100 | Connectivity

The WorkForce WF-100 offers plethora of connectivity options. You can connect to a computer via USB , or latch to local area network via 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. Not enough? you can make a direct peer-to-peer connection to a computer or mobile device via Wi-Fi Direct. The Epson iPrint App is a nice little utility to push your documents or photos to print from Android or iOS devices. Also you can do remote print via Epson Email Print and Epson Remote Print via email.

Epson WorkForce WF – 100 | Performance

Setting up the WF-100 via USB method is a traditional and straight forward but what interests more is the WiFi connectivity atleast for me and probably for you too. You have the LED display, you can scan the WiFi connections and then you should be just keying in the password of the network to pair it. Yes, it is as simple as that and the D-Pad was good at navigating the menus. The frustration comes in when you need to feed the password. Scrolling through A-Z a-z 1-0 !-= options with those up and down buttons can test your patience especially if you have a good combination of alpha-numeric and special characters as passphrases for security. Yes, it does remember the the SSID and Password of the WiFi as long as you don’t switch the WiFi modes (to WiFi direct) and then you might have to go through the gruel of scrolling all over again. The WF-100 has an auto-sleep function when it is left idle but hit the print and the printer wakes up to work. The print quality is decent. The text, resumes, articles on the web all comes out well on print but I should say this is not primarily a photo print oriented printer, though it can deliver some decent images. The WF-100 makes use of two ink cartridges, one for black ink, and the other combining cyan, magenta, and yellow. The black cartridge has a rated yield of 250 pages; the color cartridge, 200. You might also have to invest on a maintenance kit that stores ink that gets flushed from the system during print head cleaning. When the maintenance box needs a replacement, you get an alert. And the Epson iPrint App comes very handy to know the health of the printer along with the maintenance timeline. Again, the print speed varies when running on AC and battery. Epson claims a speed of 7ppm in mono and 4ppm in colour and 4ppm and 2ppm respectively when powered by batteries. In our practical tests, it dropped a little from the claimed speed, the WF100 is a tad slow but then you get the ease of portability and wireless connectivity on the go. What I really liked though is the power to take print right from the Smartphone and that too easily. Most of us shoot pics on our Smartphones these days and just pushing the photos from the phone to printer without any hassles is an added advantage.

Epson WorkForce WF – 100 | Verdict

The mobile printer market has heated up but still Epson WF-100 still holds the edge with its compact format and light weight. If portability and convenience of wireless connectivity is what you would look at, then the Epson Workforce WF-100 is something you can look at. There are mobile printers that even thrown in scan option and touch displays but it depends on what your primary use case of a printer is to figure out what really works for you.]]>

Epson Launches a New Entry-Level EH-TW5300 Full–HD Projector

Lakshmi Rajan — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 14:05:23 +0000

The new projector can handle 3D projections and thus making the cinema and gaming experience in 3D more affordable. It also makes uses of Bluetooth-powered 3D glasses that Epson claims is better than the ones that use infrared signals. If you use the lamp in Eco mode, Epson claims you can watch a movie per day for the next 11 years.

Key features of Epson EH-TW5300 projector

Amazing Colour Brightness – Up to 3x brighter colours than 1-chip DLP projectors.
High Definition 1080p – For Full HD movies, games and more — up to 300″ on virtually any wall or screen.
Wide Ranging Connectivity – Connect to virtually any device.
Mobile High Definition Link (MHL) – Simply connect your MHL compatible smart device with an MHL cable to enjoy content from your smartphone or tablet, including movies, games and more.
Detail Enhancement – Makes DVDs and standard definition content come alive.
Frame Interpolation – For smoother, sharper and more realistic action scenes.
Exciting 3D Adventures – Delivers eye-popping 3D entertainment at home with RF 3D glasses (sold separately).
2D-to-3D Conversion – Easily transform 2D images to spectacular 3D for unlimited 3D content.
Low Cost of Ownership – Long life, cost efficient lamps and a High Efficiency Filter extends the life of your projector and allows for hassle free maintenance.
New Home Screen – A new simple home screen, puts all the most commonly used functions at your fingertips.
Easy Setup – Getting started is easy with image adjustment tools and a built in 5W speaker.

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