This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
After the paper feeding issues of the two Canon printers I owned I decided I needed a rear paper fed printer to solve the paper pickup issues front fed printers seem to have. First thing I noticed out of the box is the instructions call for setup using a USB cable temporarily to setup the WIFI. We only have two windows machines here in my household that are rarely used since we are a household of tablet and Chromebook users. So I decided to see if I could set it up without booting either machine for a bit of a challenge to myself. Unboxing it was easy and finding all the blue packing strips to take off took a bit but it wasn’t hard. Filling the ink wells was easy once you figured out the bottle ends were keyed to only fit one spot and direction which was a nice touch to insure you do it correctly. The ink purge was the most annoying part of the setup, when it says it will take ten minutes, trust me it’s a very annoyingly long ten minutes of waiting but it has to be done.
To setup I installed the mobile app on my phone and then used the WPS button on my router to put it into WPS search mode, then using the kinda vague one line of instructions in the Quick Start guide I was able to connect it using WPS to my router after a couple quick tries. Once set up in the app I was able to register and connect it to Espon cloud printing and to my Google Cloud printing accounts quickly and easily and was even able to test out scanning from my mobile device. So yes you do not have to have a Windows machine to set up your new printer but I do wish in the main set up guide they would give it as a different option for those that don’t wish to install software on a rarely used machine and for those households that are going away from the standard desktop setup of the days of old.
Testing out the copy mode worked perfectly, as did the printing from my Chromebook and from my phone. Being able to access the printer's maintenance and status from other devices is a nice plus instead relying on a desktop application. The only con I can think of is I really wish there was a light behind the ink wells to see them better, even if it was just a temporary light if a button was pushed etc.
The ink system is a very unique approach to the standard buy cheap printer then buy expensive tiny ink carts that only last a short while and go dry with little warning.
This is a review for the Epson Expression ET-2700 EcoTank All-in-One Printer that I received free of charge to do a beta test and review.
