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

At home, I use Canon G3000 which lacked a display and wireless functionality. Later models in the 3000 series did add these missing features. The G3060 has a two line display and Canon says the printing speed is a bit better on this, well let’s find out how faster it is in my real test.

Box contents:

• The G3060 printer
• Black and Color heads
• Black Original Ink Bottle x 1
• Cyan Original Ink Bottle x 1
• Magenta Original Ink Bottle x 1
• Yellow Original Ink Bottle x 1
• Power cord
• USB to printer cable
• CD with drivers
• Documents

Setting up the Canon G3060

The setup is fairly easy but if you are doing it for the first time, it might overwhelm you but trust me it is an easy job. The Canon documentation gives you pictorial guide to walk through the setup. You can also watch my video if that makes it easier.

Compared to how I had to squeeze the ink bottles of my Canon Pixma 3000 to get the ink flow into the smart tank, the new design of the bottle makes it very easy and smooth. You just pop the bottle into the nozzle. The spill free design does the job neat without any ink dripping outside plus no squeezing either. As usual with most printers these days, installing the print heads is no-brainer, simple plus and shut job.

Of course the display would let you know if there is any error happened.

Canon G3060 Design

The printer weighs approximately 6.4 kg. If you would want to know the dimension to see if it fits wherever you are going to place it, out of the box it measures 445 x 330 x 167 mm. With the tray extended it measures 445 x 555 x 238 mm.

The display and buttons are all laid out on the top for easy access. It has got a 5.08 cm LCD display for easy navigation and confirmation of print settings. It’s a monochrome display supporting two lines. Underneath the display is the navigation buttons. You also find power button, menu, scanner copier, WiFi etc in an array of assortments.

The ink maintenance cartridge can be easily accessed from behind in case of any issues. It is easily replaceable. The paper tray is tucked in at the rear. When closed, there is a lid that makes sure dust doesn’t go inside through that gap. On top, we have the Scan bed.

Connectivity & Features

Apart from the USB wired connectivity, the G3060 is WiFi-enabled and provide smart wireless connectivity for printing. There is no dual-band support and works on 2.4Ghz. It also supports remote printing via Canon Canon PRINT Inkjet/SELPHY. This feature is very handy both at work and home, where multiple users or family members can print without having to login to a connected computer. The G3060 does not have the automatic two-sided printing option. It allows for duplex printing but you need to do reverse feeding.

The copy mode offers many features like enlarge, reduce, print intensity etc. The display offers many useful features to access right on the printer.

How to connect the Canon G3060 to Wifi?

The printer can be connected to your Wifi router via the cableless connect button or by WPS push method or by manually. I got it done easily via the cableless connect button option.

• Press and hold the cableless connect button for 3 second
• You will get a prompt in the display
• Then go to your mobile Wifi settings, choose the Canon Wifi temporary Wifi that would be visible, select it and connect to that Wifi
• Open the Canon Printer App, it will detect the Canon printer and would prompt you to add the device. Add it.
• After adding the screen would prompt you to add the home Wifi network, add it back.
• The printer would show it connecting and finally press the OK button to complete the setup

Canon G3060 Specs, Speed and Cost per print

The G3060 is compatible with both Windows machine as well as Mac system. The G3060 is a Thermal Inkjet and Canon’s product page states it has a duty cycle of Up to 3,000 pages/month. This makes it ideal for home and small office. If you have page volumes more than these monthly numbers, you should be ideally looking at different models. For those not sure what duty cycle means printer duty cycle also called the monthly duty cycle, is the absolute number of pages that can be printed per month at the rated print quality of a machine and without errors/jams.

The maximum support document size is A4 / LTR. The supported paper quality are Plain Paper, Photo Paper Plus Glossy II (PP-201/PP-208), Photo Paper Pro Luster (LU-101), Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss (SG-201), Matte Photo Paper (MP-101), Glossy Photo Paper(GP-508)

Let’s see the claimed IPM values. IPM is Images Per Minute. Canon uses IPM instead of PPM, IMP values are comprehensive with a mix of word, excel and pdf print averages. For G3060 Canon claims 10.8 IPM or prints per minute in black and 6 IPM or prints per minute in colour. Canon says you can take 6000 black and white prints and 7700 prints with the refill bottles. The cost of each subsequent refill bottles would be around Rs 400 in India, so the print cost would be very affordable in this printer.

The print quality including photos come real good. The print speed in my real practical test varied a bit a color print of 4*6 size took close to a minute, an A4 color document print took around 34 seconds. For a home use this should be manageable.

Verdict:

Canon G3060 offers lots of features including wireless easy printing for home needs. This would be an ideal printer for home use and for small business with less than 3000 pages printing requirements.

Box contents of Smart Tank 530

• HP Smart Tank 530
• 135-ml Black Original Ink Bottle – 3 Nos.
• HP GT52 Cyan Original Ink Bottle
• HP GT52 Magenta Original Ink Bottle
• HP GT52 Yellow Original Ink Bottle
• Power cord
• USB to printer cable
• Setup guide
• Black and Color heads

Setting up the Smart Tank 530

Even if you are a novice, it should be an easy straight forward setup and the pictorial setup guide comes very handy. I found filling the ink bottles easier than what I did on my Canon Pixma 3000, where I had to squeeze the bottle for the flow but in Smart tank you just pop the bottle into the nozzle. The spill free design also makes sure it is not a messier job. Even installing the print heads was simple plug and shut case. The touch display initially gives an easy display instruction step by step and also shows error message if you did something wrong. It’s a stress free easy job getting this printer ready to go.

HP Smart Tank 530 Design

The Smart Tank 530 weighs 6.19 kg. It has a dimension of 449 x 373 x 198 mm that can go to maximum 449 x 605.65 x 258.7 mm when the feeder tray is opened up. The touch display is a neat addition for the touch generation to navigate through the menus. The ink levels are clearly visible in front which is very convenient.

The paper tray is tucked in at the rear. When closed, there is a lid that makes sure dust doesn’t go inside through that gap. On top we have the Scan bed and above that is a automatic document feeder (ADF) for copying. Though do note, it is not doubled side ADF.

Connectivity & Features

Apart from the USB wired connectivity, the Smart Tank 530 is dual band WiFi-enabled and provide smart wireless connectivity for printing. It also supports remote printing via HP Smart app. This feature is very handy both at work and home, where multiple users or family members can print without having to login to connected computer. The Smart App available on both PC and mobile is versatile and also allows customizable smart tasks for regular printing needs.

Dual-band WiFi uses two frequencies 2.4 GHz (frequencies used in normal home Wi-Fis) and 5 GHz. The Smart Tank 530 also has an additional connectivity option of Bluetooth LE, if in case WiFi is not available.

The 530 does not have the automatic two-sided printing option. It allows for duplex printing but you need to do reverse feeding. It is the case with the ADF too for copying.

HP Smart Tank 530 Specs, Speed and Cost per print

The 530 is a Thermal Inkjet and the HP’s product page states it has a duty cycle of up to 1000 pages and recommended monthly volume of 400 to 800 pages. This makes it ideal for home and small office. If you have page volumes more than this monthly numbers, you should be ideally looking at different models. For those not sure what duty cycle means printer duty cycle also called the monthly duty cycle, is the absolute number of pages that can be printed per month at the rated print quality of a machine and without errors / jams.

Print quality is listed as: Black: Up to 1200 x 1200 rendered dpi Color: Up to 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi color (when printing from a computer and 1200 input dpi) The input tray can handle 100-sheet input tray and output tray can accommodate 30 sheets. The ADF can handle 35 sheets maximum in its tray. The paper sizes supported are A4; B5; A6; DL envelope, legal and supports file format JPG, BMP, TIFF, PDF, RTF, TXT, PNG. Maximum scan size supported is 216 x 297 mm.

The cost of print works out as 10p for black prints and 21p for coloured prints.

Verdict:

HP Smart Tank 530 is a easy to use printer ideal for home and small office with requirements less than 1000 pages per month. The multi connectivity options including the wireless connectivity makes it a smarter printer for smart homes.

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