Epson EcoTank L6490 Printer Review – Quality and Efficiency

The traditional print world has remained essentially unchanged over the past few years. I say ‘traditional print’ to exclude the world of 3D printing, which is changing almost daily. The world of the standard printer is split into ink and laser printers, both having their merits. While the ink printer is a much cheaper initial investment, laser printers have higher speeds and lower running costs over time. This is why the latter has been geared towards businesses. However, Epson has aimed to bring these two sides much closer together with its most recent line of printers. The Epson EcoTank L6490 aims to bring much faster ink printing to your small business while keeping the initial costs and long-term overheads to a minimum.

It’s been nearly four years since the global lockdown of 2020, but its impact on daily life is still felt today. While our daily lives have, in most ways, gone back to relatively normal, remote work, or a hybrid model, remains the most significant aspect. During this time, many aspects of daily work life switched to digital, most notably signing documents. However, I’ve often found that a printer is still a requirement every so often, especially regarding legal documents, whether for work or personal. As a result, I don’t see traditional print dying out anytime soon, but the offering will need to change, which is what Epson aims for through its EcoTank series for business and home offices.

Build and Design

We don’t often look at printers, whether business or home units, as an inspiration for design. More often than not, they’re built for form and function and not for aesthetics.

The Epson L6490, however, is a sleek take on the home office printer, offering the all-in-one build in a 7.3KG device. It may come across as heavy, but given its features and capabilities, there’s a lot crammed into what I consider minimal weight.

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The squared design remains, as with most modern printers. It looks like two of Epson’s other printers stacked together and split by stilts. The two-tier design distinguishes its functionality, with the print functions on the bottom and the scanner functions (including fax) on the top. All this while still having a minimalist approach and lightweight design.

A standout of the square design is having slightly rounder grooves scattered throughout the build. These are cut-outs for paper trays or openings to assist in lifting or opening the lids.

Another noticeable change is the visibility of the ink tanks. These are more often found on home printers and hidden on office printers. Given Epson’s push towards its EcoTank refilling options, the design of this crucial feature is prominent. It allows you to see the ink levels easily and offers a break from the standard black-and-white printer design of old.

Installation and Features

Compared to the home printer range, the L6490 has a few more steps to complete to set up. That said, compared to a standard business printer, it’s much more efficient from unboxing to your first print.

Most of the time taken during the setup comes from filling the ink tank. Included in the box contents are the refill bottles. The black bottle included is roughly double the size of the colour ink bottles and has a second bottle. You’ll quickly run through the black ink in half the time for most business printing. Filling this is an easy and clean process. The bottles have connectors that fit the tanks and only release the ink once placed in position correctly.

Once you’ve completed this step, there are several steps to run through via the 2.4″ LCD touchscreen in conjunction with the tactile buttons. It takes a few minutes to run through, set up the date and time and connect to your network.

Connecting to the local network, whether it be through Wi-Fi or Ethernet, allows users to connect their laptops, smartphones and tablets to print remotely. You can also use the L6490 as a wireless router via the Wi-Fi Direct option.

Like most business printers, it has a large paper tray, allowing up to 250 sheets of A4 paper. In addition, users can use the rear feeder when they want to print on higher quality or photo paper for professional jobs while using the duplex capabilities to half the amount of paper used.

While the tray does house A4-sized paper, it supports multiple sizes. This includes the following formats: 9x13cm, 10x15cm, 13x18cm, 13x20cm, 20x25cm, No. 10 (Envelope), DL (Envelope), C6 (Envelope), 100x148mm, 16:9, Letter Legal, A6 (10.5×14.8cm), B5 (17.6×25.7cm), A4 (21.0×29.7cm), and A5 (14.8×21.0cm).

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Epson EcoTank L6490 Performance

The everyday performance of the Epson EcoTank L6490 is excellent. While I couldn’t do the complete run of tests, which would take a few months to run through, it delivered on all it promised.

For starters, the printer is high-speed using the draft mode. This saves on ink while also being significantly faster than other modes. This is most often used for text-based printing and nothing requiring additional levels of quality. Clicking the print button to test takes about 6- 7 seconds to initiate the first-page print and gets you through about 20 pages in a minute using this mode. Additionally, you can get through about five double-sided prints using the duplex feature, which is ten pages. When switching to colour printing, use the same options. The time taken adds about 20% to the timeframe. This isn’t a lousy turnaround between black-and-white versus colour printing.

Unlike many similar printers I tested previously, it’s also stable, not vibrating and rocking like a V8 engine. You can hear the printer heads working overtime internally, but nothing outwardly noticeable.

Epson uses a pigment-based DURABrite ET ink. This is economical and ensures longer-lasting prints, including a better water-resistant print. Epson claims that the initial bottles added at the start will print up to 6,000 pages of colour and an additional 7,500 pages in black and white. That’s a crazy amount of out-of-the-box printing before requiring additional funds to refill. In the end, that’s about 36 pages on average per day for a year, which is more than sufficient for any small business.

For high-quality prints, the L6490 has a maximum resolution of 4,800×1,200 DPI. The quality is excellent, and its clarity is noticeable when printing photos. It looks fantastic with bold colours and clean lines. In addition to this, it also has borderless printing on any paper size.

I spent most of the review time testing the various print options and quality. This included remote printing, which is much easier than a few years ago. However, I did spend one or two days testing the copy/scan options, which includes the auto-feed option. The results were good overall.

That said, the time taken to scan depends heavily on the DPI quality. Using its CIS sensor and LED light source, it scans a 300 DPI image in about nine seconds. Switching to 600 DPI increases the time to 16 seconds. However, selecting the high 1,200 DPI setting takes over five minutes to complete. Although this DPI is almost unnecessary for an A4 size paper, it creates an image of roughly 750MB or more.

Is the Epson EcoTank L6490 Worth It?

The Epson EcoTank L6490 offers excellent value for your small to medium business. It’s multi-function support and eco-friendly printing create great value while offering a mix of speedy and quality printing modes.

The initial overhead cost of R9,999 to purchase is very affordable. Considering that you’ll get over 13,000 printed pages from the included ink bottles, you’re looking at 36 pages per day for a year before replacing the ink. Although the official Epson refills cost around R3,500 for the complete set of ink bottles, it’s still much more affordable than outsourcing your printing needs.