Our Printer
Is a colored printer a must-have? I would say it’s definitly the number one homeschool item I recommend. I printed in black and white for the first 8 months we homeschooled because I was worried about what ink costs would look like if we got a new printer. But, when we started to research we were pleasantly surprised at what we discovered.
Epson EcoTanks are a popular choice in the homeschool world because the quality is great and the refillable ink is cheap. We decided to go with the ET-3760 and we’ve had a great experience with it! The printer has a usage history so I can tell you we printed our first page July 19, 2020 and exactly two years later, we have printed 7960 colored pages and 1035 black and white pages…so nearly 9000 pages in total! So let’s talk about some of the pros, cons, costs, and tips.
Pros
Affordable: Right now the ET-3760 is running around $430. We bought ours at Costco, but it isn’t available there right now so you can also get it on Amazon. If you visit THIS Amazon link - it’ll compare and contrast the ET-3760, 2760, 3710, and 4760 models. We felt 3760 was best for our needs, but I don’t think you could go wrong with any of the others.
Cheap Ink Refills: THIS Printer’s Jack refillable ink pack is under $20 and we’ve used it with no problems. Over two years, we’ve topped off three different times now - the most recently was today right after I took these pictures for this post! I think it’s cost us less than $60 in ink for 9000 pages though because as you can see in my picture, we don’t always use a whole bottle for a refill. We usually use about double the amount of yellow than the other colors so just keep that in mind.
Easy to Refill: All you have to do is pop the bottle onto the refill tank and it’ll automatically stop when its full. Here is a short video tutorial if you’d like to see how it works.
Bluetooth Printing: Our printer is set up right by our computer so I mostly use our computer to prompt printing, but we can do it from our phones which is a nice perk.
High Quality: With a lot of materials now days you can purchase PDFs and print at-home or buy a physical copy. I have the professionally printed Botany Science Unit from The Good and The Beautiful, but I also had the PDF so I printed the cover page so you can see the difference. In the picture, the one on the left is the professionally printed one. It is a little bit sharper to the eye and the main thing you’ll notice is that the colors are slightly lighter on the one I printed.
Colored Prints Are Inviting: In most school classrooms, children have black and white materials because printing costs would be astronomical if everyone got colored prints. So, what a blessing we can provide aesthetically pleasing, inviting, and beautiful materials in our homes. Each week we print around 10 pages for our scripture study materials, I have printed hundreds of hands-on and engaging activities, and lots of curriculum…and never had to worry about printing. A bigger project I recently did was the Dash Into Learning printables that accompany their books. I’m adding a picture from their EQ program files so you can see the great print quality and how cute those printed 3 Little Bear puppets are.
Cons
Slow to Print: The first thing I noticed was how much slower it was to print than our old black and white printer. Especially back-to-back. It isn’t a big deal when it’s just a few pages, but if you have a big project - say, an entire The Good and The Beautiful math book, I would highly recommend letting it print while you’re working on something else.
Small Paper Tray: Since we do print a lot, I feel like I am always restocking our paper tray. It only holds 150 papers so, again, no big deal for smaller jobs, but if you do a few larger print jobs - you’re going to have to refill it constantly.
Tips
There are two common questions I’ve seen with this printer. One, if you let the printer sit for sometime, the nozzles will clog and you’ll have dark colored lines appear on your prints. If this happens, it’s an easy fix by using the “Print Head Cleaning” function. I have to do this probably once a month. On some of the materials I know we use and toss each week, I’m not even bothered by the lines. Second, if you are seeing missing lines or your letters/graphics aren’t straight, you’ll need to use the “Print Head Alignment” function. We’ve only had to do this once in 2 years though.
Printing Materials We Keep On Hand
Standard White Printer Paper: We purchase our paper in bulk at Costco.
Any questions? Let me know and I am happy to help!
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