Epson no-frills monochrome EcoTank ET-M1120

Epson’s mono EcoTank ET-M1120 fill the niche for mono printing using its long life EcoTank Refillable design. At 15-pages-per-minute it is ideal for small work groups that need a specific purpose printer, e.g. accounts, receipts or paperwork.

Setup

Plug in
Connect via USB (cable extra), Wi-Fi N 2.4Ghz (easiest with WPS) or Ethernet cable
Load the drivers for Windows or macOS
Pour in ink for approx. 5000 pages
Add A4 bond paper to 150 sheet cassette (portrait mode)
Print boring but functional black and white until the Zebra’s come home

EcoTank is about the total cost of ownership

The printer costs $349 from Officeworks. You may suggest that it is a tad expensive for a 15ppm mono printer. The ink (T532) costs $24.99 for 6,000 pages. In real terms excluding a ream (500 sheets) of $5 paper that is .004165 cents a copy (under half a cent a page).

Now a typical black inkjet cartridge is about $50 for 1000 pages or five cents page. Let’s assume that you save 4.5 cents a page using the ET-M1120. You pay for the printer after 15 reams of paper. Obviously, the use case here is for those who use at least a ream of paper per month.

Print quality

Print resolution is 1440 x 720. Speed depends on the complexity of the document. Typically, we could achieve 15ppm ISO speeds although on things like invoices (only a few lines) it was up to 20ppm.

Apart from the 5-10-second first page out (and you won’t find many low-cost lasers beat that), it is not for big batch printing – the memory buffer is too small to queue a volume of papers. I suspect more than ten pages will slow it down.

Blacks were crisp and black. You can adjust tone and density in the printer driver. Our speed tests were on standard mode which is fine for99% of printing including 2/3D barcodes.

You can print via iOS and Android using a web browser to the printers IP address.