The Epson EcoTank ET-3950 stands out for its fast simplex (one-sided) printing and its automatic duplex scanning, despite having only one paper source and coming up a little short on duplex print speed.
The Epson EcoTank ET-3950 ($419.99) is one step down from the top-of-the-line ET-4950 for letter and legal-size home office all-in-one (AIO) printers. But the only difference in capabilities between the two is that the ET-4950 adds faxing to the ET-3950’s printing, scanning, and copying. For micro and home offices that don’t fax much (which is most of them), that’s not worth the $80 difference in price, at least not as long as free online fax services continue to exist. So, while both models stand out for their reversing automatic document feeders (ADFs), which can scan both sides of a page, the ET-3950 is the better value. If you need to scan or copy multipage two-sided documents even once in a while, that’s enough to make it an Editors‘ Choice award winner among inkjet AIOs for a micro or home office.Design and Features: A Heavy-Duty Home Office Printer
The ET-3950’s paper handling for printing is easily suitable for moderate or heavy-duty use by micro and home office standards, as long as you don’t need to switch between different types or sizes of paper very often. The printer can hold up to 250 sheets of paper, automatically duplex (print on both sides of the page), and handle up to legal-size paper. However, refilling or swapping out the paper in the single paper tray—located near the bottom of the front side—is more like refilling a drawer than a typical front tray. You’ll generally need to pull the tray out to add or change paper, particularly when the output tray just above it is in printing position, rather than stored.
Epson’s maximum recommended duty cycle for the printer is 1,600 pages per month. If you want to keep paper refills down to one a week, however, think in terms of 1,000 sheets (four weeks times 250 pages), which could be 1,000 simplex pages, 500 duplex (with one page on each side of each sheet), or any combination of simplex and duplex that adds up to 1,600 printed pages—400 simplex and 600 duplex, for example.
For scanning and copying, the printer offers both a letter-size flatbed and the 30-sheet reversing ADF, which duplexes by scanning one side of a page, turning it over, and then scanning the other side. The scanning takes more than twice as long as with single-pass ADFs, which scan both sides of a page at the same time, but printers with single-pass ADFs are more expensive. More important, none of the ET-3950’s most obvious competition offers any kind of automatic duplexing for scanning. And, to mangle an old saying, in the land of non-duplexing and manual-duplexing ADFs, the reversing ADF is king. Note also that scan options include scanning to email and to the cloud (Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, and OneDrive), while the copy feature lets you copy from either one- or two-sided originals to one- or two-sided copies.
