Slow Lightroom Printing with Epson ET-8550

The Epson ET-8550 has been a great addition to the printing arsenal, especially with the Shaq-approved ink tanks! I used this to print photos from my Mac, and standard quality still produces perfectly usable and fast prints from Adobe Lightroom. I could easily print a 4×6 or 5×7 within 10-20 seconds.

But it wasn’t all roses…

I attempted to run some prints from my Lightroom instance running on Windows 11, and although my drivers were up to date, it took substantially longer to print, a whopping five minutes or so for a single 5×7 print on standard quality! Something wasn’t right. Was it the wireless connection? Should I switch the driver from LPR to RAW?

Although I knew my drivers were up to date, I ran the Epson Software Updater, and a new firmware update came up for the first time since owning the printer. A reference to a new firmware, “version 05.36.OP11MB” was ready to be downloaded and installed. To keep current, I left the software updater to take care of it.

The firmware update took about 10 minutes, and it was ready to go after a reboot of the printer. I immediately ran about 12 prints, and they finished quickly, in only about three minutes. Problem solved… for now.

I tried to find release notes for the firmware update, but searches for “05.36.OP11MB” didn’t produce any results.