Epson 312 cyan · standard

The Epson 312 cyan is the standard capacity cyan for two Epson photo printers, the Expression Photo XP-8500 and the Expression Photo XP-15000. Both are built around a set of individual cartridges, so cyan is replaced by itself.

Unlike most Epson ranges, the standard size here is not a bad buy. The 312 cyan is rated at about 360 pages and lists near $14, which is about 3.89 cents a page. The 312XL cyan is rated at about 830 pages for around $28, about 3.37 cents. The XL is still cheaper per page, but the gap is small, and it is a much larger amount of ink to leave sitting in a printer you only use for occasional photos. The black side of the family behaves differently again, with the 312 black at about 6.67 cents and the 312XL black at about 6.4 cents, so black ink on these machines costs noticeably more per page than the colours do.

Neither printer is firmware locked, so third-party 312 cartridges will work, and the non-genuine ink warning is dismissible. Cheap ink shows up more in photo output than in documents, because dye sets vary between makers and a print made with an off-brand cyan can shift in tone and fade at a different rate to the rest of the set. If the prints matter, keep the whole set to one brand rather than mixing genuine and compatible cartridges in the same machine.

A photo printer tends to sit between projects, and cyan is one of the colours most likely to suffer for it. The head is permanent, the nozzles dry, and the result reads as a colour cast rather than a missing block. Run a nozzle check and compare the cyan against the other colours before assuming the cartridge is empty. Faint cyan across the whole pattern is worth one cleaning cycle. Cyan that is missing entirely and does not come back after cleaning is a head fault, and no new cartridge will fix it.