EPSON L380 printer review: Ideal for home and small businesses

Epson has launched its ink tank series printers quite a while ago with promise to have cost effective printing solutions with ease and low maintenance. Epson L380 is one of the series and we got a chance to review this device. This printer is priced at INR 12,089/- , but whether this device does justice to its pricing and the expectations set by it? Let's find out.

Design:

In first look you will find that L380 looks similar to other multi functional printers where in you have a lid atop which can be raised to do the scanning or copying work. The device can work on at most A4 size paper and weighs around 4.4 Kg. On the right side of the device you will see the extension attached which is the inktank, separate ink box helps in easier access and visibility of ink levels.

Epson L380

The input for printing is taken from back side of the printer and printed copies are produced to the front side. To collect your A4 size papers you can draw the tray from bottom to extend it to give support to the output paper. On the front of the device you will see Epson branding below which there are 4 functional buttons which are Power, Black and White copy, Color Copy and inklevel/warning indicator , last button can also be used to cancel current operation. While middle two buttons can be pressed simultaneously to scan and save document as pdf.

The device offers connectivity via USB cable and there is no wireless connectivity option given. Overall the printer looks sturdy and reasonably built. Our only concern was the side attachment for color box which is prone to get detach when not handled carefully while lifting the printer.

Performance:

We had interesting encounter with the device, we started testing the copy feature and found color reproduction was not good when doing color copies. We contacted Epson representatives and they sent an engineer to look into the issue. It turned out that the issue was just with the nozzles not being cleaned and could be easily cleaned by sending a simple command from computer. We installed the device drivers from web and did the steps as suggested. Once we had printed a test page everything was working like charm. The prints were coming as close to real and copies were identical to the original.

The printing speed for Black and white prints is good for text which is around 11 pages per minute however for colored text prints the speed drops to around 5 pages per minute as expected. For printing colored images of A4 size the printer takes around 1 minute. The images printed on glossy paper were of high quality and we were happy with the prints we got from device.

Company claims to print 7500 colored copies (text) and 4500 black and white copies with single set of refill. The ink levels before and after our testing kind of support the same.

Verdict:

The device is extremely easy to use and maintain. The prints are cost effective as promised in ink tank series printers. The colors are evenly distributed and one can obtain high quality images from the printer without having to worry much about the cost.  Though, the device lacks wifi (at this price point its unfair to expect though), the inktank attachment could be better fixed.

Keeping above points in mind we can easily recommend this device for home use and small businesses. However for very heavy daily usage its not recommended.