Ink Tank & Ecotank Printers Reviewed
07/02/2023
Epson Ecotank and other manufacturers ink tank system have been around for a while now but are they as good as they are claimed. We have ben selling both original and compatible ink tanks refill bottles for some time and so have a good insight into the pros and cons of the system.
Value For Money Of Ecotank & Ink Tanks
Epson claim incredible saving can be made if you buy an Epson Ecotank printer.
Lets take the Which Magazine recommended 2023 printer the Epson ET-8500 as an example. It`s claimed that ink costs for 12 months printing of about 600 pages per year is only £2 or £3. This does not take into account the £600 purchase cost of the printer.
This is based on a full set of ink bottles costing about £55 for the 337ml of ink the contain. However a set of our best selling compatible Epson 603 ink cartridges containing 60ml and cost £15 per set. The 6 sets needed to give you the same pages as the ink tanks would cost more at £90 so that is a saving for the ink tank bottles. However the typical price of a cartridge based printer is £75. So you need to run your Ecotank printer for about 20 years to break even.
Of course a very heavy user of ink will benefit from these ink tank system, but the normal home user will not.
Use and Maintenance
Ink dries and unless you print a lot you will run into problems with Epson Ecotanks and other ink bottle system. If you think about the example above, the ink would be sitting in your printer for 10 years but the Epson and most other manufacturers including our self only warranty ink for 1 year.You will be running head cleaning cycles extremely often which itself uses ink.
Our number 1 support request is now about blocked heads on ink tank based printers and that using original Ecotank inks.
In Summary
Printing more than 5000 pages per year than maybe ink tank printers are for you. Much less than this and you should stick to a cartridges based printer with good quality compatible ink cartridges.