Review Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850 review

Doug4907

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Feb 10, 2015
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For a long time I had a Brother MFC J5720 DW with a document feeder unit. This worked well in all regards except for the ink cartridges kept registering empty (when they weren't) and refusing to print. (yep, I got tired of covering the level indicator window with black tape). The duplex document scanner scanned all manner of documents even when the docs were in very poor condition.

Because of the ink cartridges issues with Brother I decided to buy an eco tank Epson ET-5800. I scan all my incoming correspondence, and OCR, so I paid an extra abt AUD$300 for the duplex scanner, bringing the total cost of the Epson to over AUD$1000 (the Brother that scanned without any issues cost abt AUD$290, which included the duplex scanner!). (AUD$1000 is abt US$780).

Not stated anywhere in the info when I purchased the EPSON, and I subsequently found later on their website, was something that said, and I am paraphrasing, that scanned documents must be in good condition.

Tonight in yet another attempt I inserted 11 excellent condition pages into the duplex scanner, and set the scanner to duplex scan mode. ie 11 total pages with some sides being blank. The software was set to "skip blank pages". So there were 17 sides with text on them. This new Epson MFC scanned just 4 and missed 13! This is a terrible result and is unacceptable, and it mirrors all my other attempts.

To be clear, this very expensive printer performs well for printing and flatbed scanning, but the $300 duplex document scanner is rubbish. Contacting Epson resulted in suggestions that I was maybe scanning with paper clips left on, or multiple pages stapled together, etc. You know, helpful suggestions that assume one is an idiot. The only thing they missed was asking whether I had plugged the unit in.

Some years ago I had a MFC Epson with a document feeder that was also useless, but I passed it up as it was a cheap unit. I did post this problem on an official Epson forum, but Epson never allowed it to be displayed.

Does anyone have any suggestions that are more intelligent than, "pages must not be stapled".

I am a mere home user, my desktop PC is a relatively fast new Intel-based machine with 16GB RAM.

Take care everyone,
Doug Price