Epson Email Print

Epson Email Print (free) is one more example of what may become a plethora of competing options for printing through the cloud. In fact, you might think of it as Epson's answer to HP ePrint (Free, 3 stars). Both offer similar features, and both work only with one company's printers. However, there are differences, with each doing a better job than the other with some kinds of documents. Email Print's strong point is handling graphic file formats, which could be a key advantage if you want to print photos or documents scanned in, say, JPG format. But more on that later.

Epson currently offers an even dozen printers that support Email Print including both the Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce Pro WP-4020 ($149.99 direct, 4.5 stars) and Epson WorkForce Pro WP-4540 All-in-One Printer ($399.99 direct, 4 stars) that I've recently reviewed. However, Epson also says that it expects to add the feature to most of its future network-ready models.

For this look at Email Print, I used the WorkForce 4020 for printing, but also had a previous installation of the Epson Artisan 730 ($199.99 direct, 3 stars) in my Email Print account, which let me browse through the settings and see some differences. Epson says that most of the comments here should apply to all Email Print printers, with only minor variations.

Setup
Setting up for Email Print is included as part of the standard process of installing your printer. As with HP ePrint, the main requirement is that the printer has to be connected to your network by Ethernet or WiFi, so it can communicate with the Epson Web site directly. The service won't work over a USB connection to a computer.

Once the initial setup is finished, you can send emails to the printer, but the original email address will have random characters for the user name, which means you'll probably want to change it to something easier to remember.

You may want to change other options as well. You can, for example, add a list of approved email addresses to accept print jobs from; specify what email notifications to send you (the only notification on by default is for printing errors); and add a printer description, which can be useful if you have more than one of the same model on your account. Simple check box options also let you specify whether to print the sender's information and body of the email message.

One additional option gives you a choice between printing image files on plain paper or photo paper. By default, Email Print will print everything on plain paper and let you set it for either letter or A4 size. If you add a check to the Photo Paper Printing check box, however, it will print image format files on photo paper instead, and only as 4 by 6s?or whatever the equivalent is for your geographic location. According to Epson, the photo paper size is determined by the country code stored in the printer, which varies depending on where you bought it.

Epson says the option to use plain or photo paper for image files is available for all printers. However, the choices vary depending on the printer's trays. With the WP-4020, for example, the only choice for printing with photo paper was the rear tray. The option for the Artisan 730 substituted the photo tray. For printers with only one tray, choosing the photo paper option will prevent non-image files from printing. However, Email Print will hold the files for up to 72 hours, according to Epson, and print them when you switch the setting back to plain paper.

Basics
As you might expect, Email Print has a few limitations. The most important is the relatively short list of file formats it can print, although it's a well chosen list, with Microsoft Word DOC and DOCX, Excel XLS and XLSX, PowerPoint PPT and PPTX, and PDF for business file formats plus JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG, and TIFF for image files. This is almost the same list that HP ePrint offers, but without TXT and HTML.

As with HP ePrint also, Email Print puts both upper and lower limits on file sizes, although the upper limit is substantially higher, at 10 MB instead of 5. The lower limit is for image files that will print at less than 150 pixels per inch. It also limits the number of printable attachments in a single email to a maximum of ten.

Most important, although Epson doesn't use the term convenience printing as HP does, it has similar shortcomings. More precisely, output isn't always an exact match to the way it would look if you printed directly from a computer.

How Well Does it Work?
I tested Email Print with all the same business application files we use for testing printers, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF formats, plus TIF and JPG image formats. All of the pages printed without serious problems, and I didn't see any issues with Excel or PDF files, but some PowerPoint and Word files didn't match the way they printed directly from a computer.

The differences for PowerPoint were minor, with slides slightly larger than when printing directly, leaving a smaller border around the slide on the page. With Word, most pages printed correctly, with the right font style and font size, but two pages printed with different line breaks than they should have. In a multipage document, this can affect page breaks as well, adding an extra line to some paragraphs and pushing text onto the next page. This shouldn't generally be an issue, but could be a problem for heavily formatted documents.

With Email Print set to use plain paper for image files, all of the TIF and JPG files were expanded to fill the entire page, whether they were defined in Photoshop at 4 by 6 or 8 by 10. With Email Print set to print the files on photo paper, they were all resized to print at 4 by 6 and the printer automatically fed the photo paper from the rear tray, as promised. The first option is the setting of choice if you want to print, say, image files of scanned documents. The second is the obvious choice for photos.

Having this option for image files at all is a welcome touch, and more than HP ePrint offers. On the other hand, it would be even better if Epson added the ability to override the default setting with a command like Photo or Plain in the subject line or the first line of body text. Epson says it's considering doing exactly that in a future upgrade. The concern is to do it in a way that won't confuse users or lead to accidentally overriding the current setting with text that's simply part of a subject line or body text.

As with HP ePrint, Epson Connect Email works well enough to be useful. Based on my test results, HP ePrint handles text files a little more consistently?at least, it didn't change the line breaks in my tests from the way it prints them directly from a computer. That may make it your preferred choice if you print many heavily formatted text files. On the other hand, if you're more concerned with printing documents scanned into JPG format, only Epson Email Print will let you print them at full size, making it the better choice for image files, at least for the moment.

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