Epson EcoTank ET-4850

Ink tankBottles

This is the ET-3850 with the missing piece fitted: a 30-sheet document feeder and a fax modem on top of the cassette, the Ethernet port, the touchscreen and the 15.5 ISO ppm engine. For a home office it is the most complete machine Epson sells under five hundred dollars, and the running cost is the same third-of-a-cent black page as every other 502-based EcoTank — the feeder does not make the ink more expensive. The honest caveat is that you are paying a hundred dollars for the ADF alone, and a lot of households discover they scan two pages a month. The other is that the feeder is single-sided: it will pull a stack through, but a two-sided original still comes back for a second pass. If your paperwork arrives in stacks, that hundred dollars pays for itself in a week of not standing at a flatbed.

Approx. price: ~$499
Cost per mono page: 0.33¢
Cost per colour page: 1.2¢
Cost to own, 5,000 pages: ~$524
Print speed, mono: 15.5 ISO ppm

Best for

A working home office that prints, copies and scans every day and wants one machine to do all three without compromises.

marks an estimate. Computed from the consumable's ISO page yield and its list price. An estimate. Purchase price plus ink or toner over the pages shown, assuming four mono pages for every colour page. Price is an approximate snapshot from our last catalogue update.

What it costs to own

Black consumable: Epson 502 black bottle · 7,500 ISO pages · ~$24.99
Colour consumable: Epson 502 colour bottles · 6,000 ISO pages · ~$16.99 each
Cost per mono page: 0.33¢
Cost per colour page: 1.2¢
Cost to own, 5,000 pages: ~$524
Cost to own, 200 pages/month for 3 years: ~$535 (7,200 pages)

Computed from the consumable's ISO page yield and its list price. An estimate. How this is worked out

Cost to own · 5,000 pages

Epson EcoTank ET-4850~$524
~$499 printer + ~$25 supplies
Epson EcoTank ET-3850~$424
~$399 printer + ~$25 supplies
Epson EcoTank ET-2850~$324
~$299 printer + ~$25 supplies

purchase priceink or toner. An estimate: purchase price plus 5,000 pages at each printer’s computed cost per page, assuming 4 mono pages for every colour page. Printers whose consumable price we could not source are left out.

Specifications

Manufacturer-published figures. Cost lines are computed from the consumable figures above and are estimates.

Approx. price: ~$499
Cost per mono page: 0.33¢
Cost per colour page: 1.2¢
Cost to own, 5,000 pages: ~$524
Cost to own, 3 years: ~$535
Technology: Piezo inkjet
Ink system: Bottles
Inks: 4
Black consumable: Epson 502 black bottle · 7,500 pages
Colour consumable: Epson 502 colour bottles · 6,000 pages
Ink in the box: 7,500 pages
Third-party ink lock: No
Ink subscription: None offered
Print speed, mono: 15.5 ISO ppm
Print speed, colour: 8.5 ISO ppm
Functions: Print · Copy · Scan · Fax
Two-sided printing: Auto
Document feeder: 30 sheets
Two-sided scanning: No
Paper capacity: 250 sheets
Max paper size: Legal
Borderless photo: Yes
Resolution: 4800 × 1200 dpi
Connectivity: Wi-Fi · Ethernet
Mobile printing: AirPrint · Mopria
Display: 2.4" colour touchscreen
Dimensions: 14.8 × 16.7 × 9.8 in
Weight: 17.6 lb
Released: 2021

Features

30-sheet automatic document feeder with fax
250-sheet enclosed paper cassette
Automatic two-sided printing
Wired Ethernet and dual-band Wi-Fi
2.4-inch colour touchscreen
Four refillable tanks on the 502 ink set

Document feeder Auto duplex No ink lock Borderless photo Ethernet Fax

In its favour

Everything a small office asks for in one chassis: cassette, duplex, ADF, fax, Ethernet, touchscreen
Cost per page is unchanged from the cheapest 502 EcoTank — roughly 0.33¢ mono
15.5 ISO ppm black is fast enough that the ADF is not waiting on the printer
Two years of ink in the box, and refills cost less than a single cartridge elsewhere
No firmware lock on third-party bottles
A 30-sheet feeder and a 250-sheet cassette mean neither scanning nor printing runs out of paper mid-job
Ethernet removes the offline-printer problem that dominates complaints about every wireless model here

Against it

A hundred dollars more than the ET-3850 purely for the feeder and fax
The ADF scans one side only
Big — this is a desk-corner appliance, not a shelf printer
Four-ink photo output is fine, not the six-ink ET-8500's
Epson's maintenance box eventually needs replacing, an extra consumable buyers forget

What owners say

Distilled from owner discussions and long-term published reviews

This is the machine that gets recommended when someone describes an actual home office — printing daily, scanning paperwork, occasionally faxing — and does not want to think about ink again. Owners describe it as boring in the way good equipment is boring.

The two reservations that recur are physical rather than functional. It is big, and people underestimate that. And the document feeder is single-sided, so anyone digitising double-sided records is running every stack through twice and then re-sorting. The Canon MAXIFY GX7020 is the machine people move to when that becomes the daily annoyance.

On cost, this is the printer that makes the tank argument concrete: a household printing two hundred pages a month spends around five dollars a year on black ink at the yields and prices Epson publishes.

What owners like

The most complete home-office machine owners recommend under five hundred dollars — cassette, duplex, feeder, fax, Ethernet and touchscreen in one box
Owners report the in-box ink lasting a year or more at typical home-office volumes
The touchscreen gets specific praise for making walk-up copying and scanning workable
Ethernet removes the wireless-reliability complaints that dominate discussion of cheaper printers
Fast enough that the document feeder is not left waiting on the printer
Third-party 502 bottles work without firmware trouble

Common complaints

The feeder scans one side only — owners digitising double-sided paperwork find this out the hard way
Large; several owners describe underestimating the footprint
Still clogs if it sits unused for long stretches, like every printer in the line
The maintenance box is a consumable owners do not learn about until it needs replacing

Questions that keep coming up

Does the document feeder scan both sides?

No. It pulls a stack through and captures one face, so a double-sided original has to be re-fed. Owners who digitise a lot of two-sided paperwork describe this as the feature they would pay to change. The Canon MAXIFY GX7020 and Brother MFC-L3780CDW both do single-pass two-sided scanning if that matters.

How long does the ink in the box actually last?

Epson rates the in-box fill at 7,500 black ISO pages. Owners printing typical home-office volumes describe getting a year or more before the first refill, and refills that cost less than a single cartridge on the printer they replaced. Frequent head-cleaning cycles eat into it, which is why occasional printing costs more per page than the numbers suggest.

Is it too big for a desk?

It is close to 15 inches wide, 17 deep and 10 tall, and owners regularly report being surprised by it in person. It is a desk-corner or side-table appliance rather than something that shares space with a monitor. The ET-3850 is the same width but shorter, and the two-digit EcoTanks are considerably smaller.

Computed from the consumable's ISO page yield and its list price. An estimate. Owner notes are a summary of what people who own the machine report, not a test result — there is no lab behind this site.