Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550: photos, not paperwork

Home photo printing has a long history of disappointing the people who try it, usually at the moment the third cartridge runs dry in the middle of a print. The Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 is built to answer that specific complaint. It refills from bottles, it carries six inks where a general-purpose printer runs four, and it prints borderless all the way up to 13 by 19 inches. If you print your own photos or artwork in any real quantity, that combination is the reason to look at it.

One thing to settle first: the box says all-in-one, and the instinct is to treat it as an office machine. It is a photo printer first. The scanning and copying are real, but the ink set, the paper path and the design all point at pictures over paperwork. Buy it for plain documents alone and you pay for a lot you will not use. The rest of the photo printer picks sort along the same line.

What the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 is for

Printing your own photos and creative work at home, up to A3+, without the per-cartridge sting. Epson includes a full set of six ink bottles in the box, each 552 bottle holding 70 mL, which is a large amount of ink next to a cartridge. The value sits there: you are pre-paying for ink you would otherwise buy a cartridge at a time. What it is not is a document machine for a busy office. PCMag, which named it their favorite consumer wide-format photo printer, flags the same limit: there is no automatic document feeder, so every page you scan or copy goes on the glass one at a time.

The six inks, and what Photo Black and Gray add

Six inks, not the four a general-purpose printer carries. Alongside cyan, magenta, yellow and black sit a dedicated Photo Black and a Gray, and those two are the ones you see the results from. They deepen shadow detail and lift grayscale, and PCMag credits them for the machine's black and white output, calling its dark areas deeper and richer. PCMag also rated it twice as fast as the model it replaced, the 2017 Expression Premium ET-7750, and found the sixth ink improved color accuracy and detail. The numbers behind it are Epson's. Maximum print resolution is 5760 x 1440 dpi, and a borderless 4 by 6 photo comes out in as fast as 15 seconds in the printer's draft mode on glossy paper, per the specification sheet.

How big it prints, and the media it takes

This is the ecotank et-8550 wide format model, and paper handling is the real reason to pick it over a letter-size photo printer. It prints borderless from 3.5 by 5 up to 13 by 19 inches. That one range covers snapshot prints, standard 8 by 10s and full A3+ art on a single machine.

Media flexibility is the other half. Two front trays feed everyday paper and photo paper, and a rear straight-through path takes heavier stock: cardstock and specialty media up to 1.3 mm thick. It prints directly onto a CD or DVD as well. That rear path is why the machine wants clearance behind it, and a lot of card makers and fine-art printers buy it for that feature.

Running it day to day

Refilling is the routine you sign up for in place of swapping cartridges. Each color has its own keyed bottle, so magenta pours into the magenta tank and nowhere else, and Epson quotes a set of bottles at 6700 pages for the black, 7300 for the photo black and 6200 for the color set. No computer needs to be in the loop either. A 4.3 inch color touchscreen drives it, with SD card and USB memory slots, a phone app, and voice printing through Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant, and connections cover Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, wired Ethernet and USB. As an epson et-8550 photo printer this is the fully loaded end of the consumer line, short of the professional tier.

ET-8550 vs ET-8500, and the printer above it

The et-8550 vs et-8500 question comes down to one thing: paper size. The smaller ET-8500 is the same six-ink engine and the same tank system, but it tops out at 8.5 by 14 inch Legal paper and cannot print the 13 by 19 sheets that are the ET-8550's reason to exist. If your largest print is ever a letter or an 8 by 10, the ET-8500 does the identical job in a smaller machine. Go the other way and the step up is a professional model such as Epson's SureColor P700, which adds more inks and finer control for someone selling prints. The ET-8550 sits deliberately between them: more printer than most homes need, less than a print shop requires.

Who should skip the ET-8550

Skip it if you mostly print plain text in volume. A plain office EcoTank prints documents faster and takes less desk space, and here you would be spending photo inks on spreadsheets. Skip it if you scan or copy in stacks, because a flatbed with no document feeder makes that slow. Skip it if desk space is tight. By Epson's figures the printing footprint is 20.6 by 29.8 inches with the trays out, and the printer alone weighs 24.5 pounds, so it is a permanent fixture. You will not tuck it away. One last thing before you buy: check who the seller is, and confirm the warranty applies, because the 2-year coverage depends on registration and genuine Epson ink.

If you are the buyer this printer is for, the setup that matters is placement: give it room behind for the straight paper path, near where you will keep paper stocked, because a photo printer earns its keep only when it is easy to walk up to and use. It holds the overall slot on our photo printer picks, built on Epson's spec sheet, the live listing and PCMag's hands-on test.