Comparison – HP Envy Vs Epson Ecotank

Comparison – HP Envy Vs Epson Ecotank

The printer in our house is a highly used product, it is used by ourselves as well as our teens on a daily basis. It is used to print our teens school/college work. We use it ourselves to print off our work files, tickets, recipes, photos, contracts etc so high quality printing is highly needed.

Here are both the printers..

This is the HP Envy 5540.

And this is the Epson Ecotank L355.

Setting up

We found the set up for both rather straight forward. Both printers came with instructions which was easy to follow. Setting up of both printers was rather stress/hassle-free, didn’t take long at all.

Price comparison

Epson Ecotank L355 is currently priced at £199.99. This is a 3-in-1 inkjet printer.

HP Envy – 5540 is currently priced at £74.99. This is an e-All-in-one printer.

Feature comparison

HP Envy 5540 is wireless. Prints, scans and copies. The printer also features a 2.2 inch display screen. There is an option to subscribe to Instant Ink and utilise paying for your ink with a choice of different ink subscription packages. Packages start from £1.99.

Instant Ink is where the HP original ink is ordered from your printer via Wi-Fi when your running low on ink (never run out again) and then delivered to you before running out.

The Epson L355 can also print, scan and copy. This printer comes with a 2 year supply of ink. The ink for this printer is designed to do away with the need for cartridges and has an integrated ultra-high-capacity ink tank system, there are NO ink cartridges to replace with this printer. In the box with the printer was four 70 ml Epson genuine ink bottles, you simply keep the ink tanks topped up using the ink drip-free bottles. With the ink you can print up to 4,000 pages in black and 6,500 in colour. With this printer you can print from mobile devices, making life that bit more easier when at home.

Printing

HP Envy is wireless and compatible with these operating systems:

Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, Windows Vista OS X v 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X v 10.9 Mavericks and  OS X v 10.10 Yosemite.

With the HP Envy we can print, scan and copy with lab quality borderless photo printing from our PC and also from our mobile device, making our life that little easier by managing printing tasks directly from our mobile device by using the free HP app.

We can also connect our mobile device directly to the printer and print without accessing a network. We can also print from any room without causing any disruptions, we simply use the quiet mode option. We have been printing when at home and when away from home, we simply emailed the printer and had our print-outs printed and ready for our return home, reducing the to-do-list/work load.

The Epson L355 is also wireless and is compatible with Mac OS 10.8.5 or later, Mac OS 10.6+, Mac OS 10.7.x, Windows 7, Windows 7 x64, Windows 8, (32/64 bit), Windows Vista, Windows Vista x64, Windows XP, Windows XP, Windows XP x64.

With the Epson we found that Wi-Fi connectivity helped us print with ease using wireless printing around the home from our laptop and mobile device. The wireless printing made it easy to position and print from many places around our home. The free Epson iPrint app made life even easier for printing from our mobile devices from within our home.

 Testing

We have been using both printers now for a while, whilst using them both we have run a few basic tests.

Water test:

Don’t know about you but in our house there is always someone with a drink near important files, and yes drinks have been accidentally spilt so we thought we’d put these printers on a water test and see how well the ink survives once wet.

HP Envy 5540

Epson L355

Both smudged slightly but once dried they was still readable.

Smudge test:

Our teens are always printing off last-minute work…..If i’m honest so are we so we thought a smudge test would be a good test to do. This is how well/fast the ink dried. This test was carried out straight from each printer. We found that neither printer photos smeared when wiped with dry cotton wool pads.

Print quality comparison 

Print quality is something we highly need from our printer. Here is a print comparison of the two printers.

HP Envy 5540 

Epson L355 

We asked our followers their thoughts on the two photos. Their thoughts can be found on our Instagram here.

Speed test

When in a hurry some printers can seem to take forever to print. Whilst using the above two printers we found HP was slightly quicker for printing documents and photographs but we found the quality of the photographs better from the Epson.

Final thoughts

HP looks tidier, the paper is nicely stored away, there are two separate compartments for the different papers, photo/A4 which was great and saved time. We have had the printers now for roughly four months and have changed the HP cartridges to our second lot of ink that was sent to us before we run out and was changed hassle free.

With the Epson we have not had to top the ink up as yet. We have found the printing speed to be faster with the HP, with the Epson we had to manually change the paper when wanting to print a photo which can be annoying at times.

Ink levels can both be checked which we found great, with the Epson you can physically see how much ink you have and with the HP you can log in and see on your account how many pages you have left.

The HP is bigger in size compared to the Epson but it is more tidier to look at and have in our home.

We found the HP printer to be more suited to us. It is quicker, compact and the printer ordering the ink for us saves us from a huge worry of running out of ink. Giving us peace of mind and worry-free printing.

Disclaimer: we was provided both printers for the purpose of this post. All thoughts are our own.