Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am so disappointed with everything about this ET-4760 except the ink cost. I've been using the Epson XP-7100 and like it very much EXCEPT I spent $500 for ink for it in 6 months. What I’ve printed so far on the 4760 would have used $100 worth of ink on the 7100, but I can SEE that I’ve barely used any ink on the 4760. For that I would be willing to accept some feature compromises. But there are just too many issues with this printer and I believe it is a flawed design. I’m really disappointed that it didn’t perform better. I did work with Epson online support but they were not able to help. They responded in a reasonable time, and they were polite, but they couldn’t resolve any of my issues. They want you to try the same things over and over, and they often asked, “How many times did you try that?” At one point they actually said, “Although you may have already tried these steps, we believe the following steps will resolve the issue”. When I asked if they thought I had a defective printer or if these were common problems with this printer, they told me I had exceeded their online capability and I needed to call for continued support. Here is my review of the ET-4760 printer: SETUP: Initial setup and WiFi connection was easy and painless. However, the 4760 stopped responding when I uninstalled my 7100 printer, and I had to uninstall the 4760 and start over. It took 15 minutes to get the printer to connect to my WiFi the 2nd time, but I’ve had no connection issues since. PHOTO QUALITY; Glossy paper, High Quality mode: Acceptable to Good, Skin tone a bit washed out, but not that bad. PHOTO QUALITY: Any kind of Plain paper, Any Mode: Typically unacceptable and disappointing results (especially when compared to the XP-7100). With enough tweaking and trial and error, you can usually get acceptable results. To be clear, that is “acceptable” quality, not “GOOD”. And it varies from image to image. I couldn’t find a common setting that worked acceptably for all images on plain paper. TEXT QUALITY: Depends on color of text and paper used. Black, Blue and Green are OK. Yellow is too light to read, but who prints in yellow? Red text on photo paper & high quality mode is Acceptable to Good. I could not find ANY way to get the 4760 to print dark red on any paper other than photo paper. Attached is a picture showing the difference between the XP-7100 and ET-4760 printing the same document on the same paper (HP Premium 32, 100 Brightness), using the same program and printer setting. You can see the 7100 prints dark red and orange nicely, but the 4760 prints the red circle much lighter. COPY QUALITY: In addition to not being able to print dark red, the 4760 doesn’t copy dark red either, so printing copied dark red onto plain paper is even worse than printing directly from a document. The attached picture also shows a copy made of the red circle that was printed on the 7100. The copied print looks almost like 2 orange circles. ADDRESS LABEL PRINTING: The “vertical pitch” is wrong. I don’t know if that is the correct term, but when printing address labels using an Avery template, the top row of labels are perfectly centered vertically in the label. But every row afterwards is printed slightly more to the top than the row before it. The printing on the last couple of rows is partially off of the label. I can print these same labels on the 7100 printer without any issues. DOUBLE SIDED PRINTING: 3/16” vertical offset between the front and back sides. Probably the same “pitch” problem mentioned above. I print double sided ID tags with the same design on both sides, including a border. The 7100 vertical alignment is almost perfect on both sides, but I can’t print them on the 4760 printer because the front and back are not aligned. SCAN QUALITY: Default scan settings result in terrible scans. You have to scan at 600dpi to get scans that are close to the same quality as the original. At this setting it takes forever to scan a document. DOUBLESIDED SCAN: Not Available. Even though there is an ADF, it won’t do duplex scanning. I knew this when I bought it, but I forgot what a huge pain it is to scan double-sided documents manually. ERROR MESSAGES: Too many error messages regarding wrong paper type in printer, even when the correct paper is installed. These messages can only be resolved using the touch screen on the printer. There isn’t a pop-up message on the pc to tell you there is a problem, not even if the paper runs out. It’s frustrating to find out that nothing you’ve tried to print for the last hour has printed because it needed to verify what paper is in the printer. I’ve never had this issue with any other printer. INK MAINTENANCE BOX: I didn’t even know what this was, but I’ve already used 25% of my Ink Maintenance Box. Turns out this is a bucket where ink used during print head cleaning is disposed of. I’ve done numerous print head cleanings trying to get the printer to print red, but 25% of its life used in a week seems excessive. However, it can be user replaced for under $20. If I only have to change it once a year, it would be a small price to pay for the increased ink capacity, BUT ONLY IF the rest of the printer was any good.