Epson EcoTank ET-4800 vs ET-3850: The Fax Is the Whole Difference

Updated June 18, 2026

Epson EcoTank ET-4800 Wireless All-in-One Cartridge-Free Supertank Printer wi…

VS

Epson EcoTank ET-3850

Look — most matchups at this tier are a cheaper printer against a better one. This is not that. The fax-equipped office EcoTank ET-4800 and the home-office Epson EcoTank ET-3850 sit side by side on the same Epson line, and they share nearly everything that matters: the automatic document feeder, the wired Ethernet port, automatic two-sided printing, and the same refillable bottle ink with no subscription. Whichever you pick, you have already left the cartridge tax behind. So the real question is narrow.

That question is the fax. The ET-4800 has a fax modem; the ET-3850 does not. That single feature is the entire reason the office model exists as a separate box. Everything else either ties or tilts toward the home model — and as the spec sheet and the owner record both show, the ET-3850 is the quicker, better-rated machine of the two. The rest of this page is about whether anyone still needs the fax.

Epson EcoTank ET-4800 Wireless All-in-One Cartridge-Free Supertank Printer wi…

Epson EcoTank ET-3850

At a Glance

The same office machine, twice

Here's the thing: line these two up feature by feature and the columns read almost identically. Both are full home-office supertanks, and both already won the only fight that makes a supertank worth buying.

They escape cartridges the same way. Epson builds the ET-4800 on Innovative Cartridge-Free Printing ― High-capacity ink tanks mean no more tiny, expensive cartridges, filled by keyed EcoFit bottles. The ET-3850 is the same idea in the same class — a Cartridge-Free Supertank with Scanner Copier, ADF and Ethernet, fed by the identical bottle ink. That is the part newcomers get wrong: they assume the dearer fax model is the only real office printer, but the ET-3850 carries the same feeder and the same wired port. RTINGS' cost-per-print and page-yield testing puts that bottle-fed bracket far below any cartridge printer, and we lay out exactly how that running-cost axis gets weighed in our inkjet comparison criteria.

So the ink math is settled before you choose.

The price gap between these two Epson supertanks is about one feature — the fax modem — plus street pricing, not about how cheap either one is to feed.

Where the home model quietly wins

With cost off the table and the office hardware shared, the tiebreakers are speed, owner satisfaction, and which features you will use. On all three, the home-billed ET-3850 comes out ahead — which is the surprise of this matchup.

Start with speed. Epson rates the ET-3850 to Prints up to 15.5 pages per minute (ppm) in black and 8.5 ppm in color. — quicker on black than the fax-equipped ET-4800. Both print on both sides by themselves, too: the ET-3850 does Auto 2-sided printing helps save paper, and Epson lists the office model as doing the same — its listing confirms The printer dues Dual-Sided Print automatically. So the step up to the fax box does not buy you faster printing or any duplex you would otherwise lack.

Owners back the home model on the record. Retail listings aggregate the Epson EcoTank ET-3850 Wireless All-in-One Supertank Color Printer — 801 reviews, rated 4.1/5, a sturdier satisfaction signal than the thinner, lower-rated review base behind the ET-4800. None of that is about the fax — it is about a machine people live with and keep recommending. Consumer Reports' inkjet owner-satisfaction testing tracks exactly this kind of long-run owner sentiment as a buying signal, and we weigh it the same way across the catalog.

What more hardware actually costs you

One pattern runs through the EcoTank owner reviews, and it cuts against the instinct to pay more: the extra parts you buy are the parts most likely to break.

This is the part the spec sheet leaves off.

The feeder both share underdelivers at volume. One owner reports that The scanner is very slow and the amount of sheets you can put into the autofeeder is small before jams begin — so on either model the ADF is a convenience, not a workhorse, and the flatbed glass is the dependable scan path. The idle-clog risk that haunts every EcoTank hits hardest for a light user: one ET-4800 owner who kept it off found that The printer didn't even get through 1 round of ink before it failed. Another lives with the heads drying constantly — Constantly not printing the text. Have to clean out nozzles, align on repeat. Consumer Reports' inkjet reliability testing reaches the same conclusion that idle inkjets are the ones that fail, and RTINGS scores risk-of-clogging as a first-class metric for exactly this reason.

The ET-3850 is not immune — it shares that clog risk and the same fussy feeder. But it adds no fax module on top, so a buyer who never faxes is carrying one fewer subsystem that can go wrong. Epson's own EcoTank specifications confirm the shared cartridge-free design across both models — the fax is the bolt-on, not the foundation.

Where the office model pays back is genuine fax-and-volume work. A heavy office owner who switched to EcoTank put the cost case plainly — My office was burning through ink cartridges at hundreds of dollars a year, and bottle ink cut that to a fraction. That savings lands on both these printers, though. The fax is the only thing the ET-4800 holds alone, so the office model is worth its step only when fax is a real requirement, not a nice-to-have.

Epson EcoTank ET-4800 Wireless All-in-One Cartridge-Free Supertank Printer wi…

Epson EcoTank ET-3850

So which EcoTank — the fax model or the faster one?

Because these two share the office stack and the ink math, "who buys which" reduces to a single yes-or-no: do you fax? If you're coming from a clogged or bricked cartridge printer, either EcoTank is the upgrade and the cost savings land the same on both. The split is the fax modem — and, for everyone who does not need it, the ET-3850's speed and owner score make the choice easy.

Buy the ET-4800 if…

…you genuinely send and receive faxes. That is the one thing the ET-3850 cannot do, and for a home office that still lives on fax — some legal, medical, and small-business workflows do — the modem earns its place, with the same low cost-per-page and the same feeder and Ethernet coming along. Go in clear-eyed: you are paying for the fax, not for a faster or more reliable printer, and you take on one more subsystem that can fail. Keep it printing in color weekly so the heads stay wet.

Buy the ET-3850 if…

…you want a full office supertank and never fax — which is almost everyone. The ET-3850 keeps the automatic document feeder, the wired Ethernet, the auto-duplex, and the cartridge-free bottle economics, and it is the quicker, better-rated machine of the pair. For homework runs, home-office paperwork, scans, copies, and the odd photo, it does everything the ET-4800 does except fax, for a lower bill. We cover its real-world setup and ownership quirks in our full review of the ET-3850.

Skip both if…

…you print rarely, or you need photo-grade color these document-tuned EcoTanks were not built for. A printer that sits idle for weeks will clog on either rung, and a color laser is the honest pick for sporadic use. For the full cross-brand running-cost picture, weigh both against the field in our best supertank printers roundup, and read the whole cartridge-versus-tank case in our guide to refillable inkjet printers.