Epson ET-8500 vs ET-8550: One Engine, Two Paper Widths
Buy the ET-8550 if you will ever print bigger than legal paper, meaning an 11 x 17, a 13 x 19 or a panorama wider than 8.5 inches, or if you scan and copy legal size originals, which the ET-8500 flatbed is too short for. Buy the ET-8500 if every print fits on letter or legal paper and your scans fit on letter: it runs the same inks at the same resolution through the same rear path, in a body that weighs 18.5 lb against 24.5.
What decides it: Paper size: 8.5 inches of print width on the ET-8500 against 13 on the ET-8550, and a flatbed that stops at 11.7 inches, A4 length, on the smaller one.
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Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500
Pick this if photos up to 8 x 10, letter or legal sheets, greeting cards and discs, on a desk that cannot spare the room the wide model takes.
Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550
Pick this if 11 x 17 and 13 x 19 prints for a wall, panoramas up to 13 inches wide, and scanning or copying legal size originals on the flatbed.
| Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500 | Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 | |
|---|---|---|
| Largest print | 8.5" x 14" (Legal) | 13" x 19" (A3+) |
| Ink type | Dye, plus a pigment black for text | Dye, plus a pigment black for text |
| Ink colors | 6-color Claria ET Premium (BK, PB, C, M, Y, Gy) | 6-color Claria ET Premium (BK, PB, C, M, Y, Gy) |
| Ink system | Refillable tanks, 552 bottles | Refillable tanks, 552 bottles |
| Scanner | Flatbed CIS, 1200 x 4800 dpi, 8.5" x 11.7" max | Flatbed CIS, 1200 x 4800 dpi, 8.5" x 14" max |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Ethernet 10/100, USB | Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Ethernet 10/100, USB |
If the biggest thing you print is an 8 x 10, buy the smaller printer and stop reading. Epson ET-8500 vs ET-8550 is not a contest over print quality, because there is no gap there to find. Both run six Claria ET Premium inks at 5760 x 1440 dpi, and Keith Cooper at Northlight Images, who reviewed both machines, reports that their ICC printer profiles are "100% interchangeable".
So the et-8550 vs et-8500 question is a paper question. The ET-8500 (model C11CJ20201) has a max print size of 8.5 x 14 inches (Legal). The ET-8550 (C11CJ21201) goes to 13 x 19 inches (A3+), and nearly every other line where the two spec sheets disagree follows from carrying a wider sheet. Both hold a slot on our photo printer shortlist: the wide one as the overall pick, the small one for home.
Epson ET-8500 vs ET-8550: what the extra width buys
Three sheet sizes the ET-8500 cannot feed at all: 11 x 17 inches, A3 and 13 x 19 inches, every one of them on the ET-8550's borderless list. For most buyers that is the entire case, since the largest borderless sheet on the ET-8500's list is Legal.
Panoramas are the quieter half of it. Both sheets list user defined paper up to 78.7 inches long, so both will print a long strip. Width is what changes: 8.5 inches on one, 13 on the other.
Then the flatbed, which catches people out. The ET-8550 scans up to 8.5 x 14 inches and copies at Legal. The ET-8500 scans up to 8.5 x 11.7 inches and copies at Letter (A4), so the small printer will print a legal page that it cannot scan back in. Anybody who handles legal size paperwork at home should weigh that row above the photo sizes, because it is the difference they will meet every week.
What did not change between them
Almost everything. The two specification sheets match on the six colors (Black, Photo Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Gray), the 552 bottles and their page yields, 16.0 and 12.0 ISO ppm, the 15 second Draft Mode 4 x 6, the 1.3mm rear straight pass, direct CD printing, automatic two sided printing, the 4.3 inch touchscreen and the whole connectivity row. Neither flatbed has a document feeder. The full ET-8550 review walks through the ink and the running routine, and all of it applies to both.
Paper capacity did not grow with the paper. PCMag spotted it while testing the small one: "Even though the ET-8550 prints pages more than twice the size of those the ET-8500 can handle, it has the same paper capacity." The rear tray on the wide model does add a line of its own, 5 sheets of A3+ photo paper.
One quirk of the rear straight pass, the single sheet path for thick board: Northlight found on the ET-8500 that the rear duplex unit needs removing before that path can be used.
The owner reports carry across for the same reason. Of about 51 ET-8500 owners counted in YouTube comment threads, 6 report roller marks on their prints, and four of those six tie the marks to heavy card or baryta paper. That count is ET-8500 owners only. Northlight calls the pair identical apart from size, so treat it as a warning about thick stock on either machine.
Where the wide body costs you
Desk space, mostly. Epson's printing dimensions are 15.9 x 24.1 x 13.7 inches for the ET-8500 and 20.6 x 29.8 x 16.9 inches for the ET-8550, against storage dimensions of 15.9 x 14.5 x 6.4 and 20.6 x 14.9 x 6.7 inches. The printer alone weighs 18.5 lb on the small one and 24.5 lb on the large one.
Plan the shelf around the printing depth.
When neither Epson is the right printer
If you print to sell, look past both. Photo Review found it "difficult to recommend the ET-8500 and its A3+ sibling, the ET-8550, to photo enthusiasts because they're not true photo printers", and set beside a Canon PIXMA PRO-200 it judged the difference obvious. A dye set with a single gray, plus a pigment black kept for text, is a different tool from a pigment printer running nine colors plus a Chroma Optimizer, which is what the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-310 does at the same 13 x 19.
If all you want is a 4 x 6 from your phone, either Epson is a lot of machine for a postcard. The Canon SELPHY CP1500 prints nothing larger, by design.
And if you scan in stacks, PCMag's verdict on the ET-8500 applies to both: for multipage scans, "the lack of an ADF should be a deal-breaker".