Epson ink cartridge and EcoTank bottle chart every number against every one of the 46 Epson models in our catalogue, with the rated yield and the real cost per page of each tier

Find your number without hunting for the manual

Open the printer before you open a shopping tab. The answer is printed either on the machine or on the thing you are about to take out of it.

• Open the lid or the scanner unit. If a carriage slides across to meet you with small cartridges clipped into it, you have a cartridge machine. If nothing moves and there is a row of clear windows down the front or side showing ink levels, it is an EcoTank and it takes bottles.
• On a cartridge machine, pull one out and read the label. Epson prints the number on the top face, with any XL or XXL suffix on the end of it. The number is the same across all four colours in a set.
• On an EcoTank, lift the flap over the filling ports. Epson prints the bottle number on a sticker beside the ports on most models, and it is also on the box the printer came in.
• If the machine is empty or you are buying ahead, find the model name on the front panel and read it off the chart below.

Buying online adds one more trap. In Europe Epson labels each ink family with a picture instead of a number, so boxes carry a squirrel, an alarm clock or a pineapple, and Epson's own European store lets you filter by those names. North America uses bare numbers with no picture. If the listing in front of you has fruit on it, it is a European part number and it will not appear in the chart below.

The chart, part one: cartridge numbers

These are the 14 cartridge families in our Epson data, covering 24 printers. Find your model in the right hand column or your number in the left. The middle column lists every tier Epson sells in that family with what it is rated to print and what that works out to per page.

The one row carrying two numbers is not a mistake. Those two models take a standard set plus a separate extra large black, so the black in that machine has a different number from the colours sitting next to it.

The chart, part two: EcoTank bottle numbers

An EcoTank has no cartridges at all. You pour ink from a bottle into a reservoir, and the yields below are per bottle rather than per cartridge, which is why the figures look so different from the table above.

The bottle families are not interchangeable either, and the chart above shows how little the model name helps: the EcoTank ET-2710 and the EcoTank ET-2720 sit 10 model numbers apart in the same range and take different bottles. Check the number against your exact model before you pour, because there is no cartridge to pull back out again if you get it wrong.

Why Epson's numbers trip people up

There is no rule connecting a printer's model number to its ink number, and Epson reuses the same three digit shape for two completely different products. Our own catalogue is full of the results.

A bottle number and a cartridge number look the same. Nothing in the digits tells you which is which. If you are buying from a listing rather than from a box in your hand, match it to your printer, not to a number you half remember.

Neighbouring numbers are not neighbouring printers. The WorkForce Pro range in our data runs on 3 families whose numbers differ only in the middle digit: the WF-4720 and WF-4740 take 802, the WF-7820 and WF-7840 take 812, the WF-3820 takes 822. Nothing in the model number predicts which one you need.

Similar model names can take unrelated ink. The WorkForce WF-7710 takes 252 and the WorkForce Pro WF-7820 takes 812, and those are different cartridges entirely, despite the two machines sharing most of their model number.

Where XL pays for itself, and where it does not

Epson sells a larger tier on most cartridge numbers, and the received wisdom is that the big one is always cheaper per page. On our data that is true most of the time and false often enough to be worth checking. Across the 52 places where a standard and a larger version fit the same slot, 14 cut the running cost by half or more, while 5 save you nothing at all.

The best case is Epson 822 to Epson 822XL in black, which takes the cost per page from 6.3c to 1.8c. Buying the standard size on that machine costs 3.5 times as much per page for the life of the printer.

At the other end, Epson 273 to Epson 273XL and Epson 410 to Epson 410XL in black are priced at exactly the same cost per page in both sizes. The XL there buys you fewer trips to the shop and nothing else, so take whichever is discounted.

The one to watch is Epson 302. Its yellow costs 4.7c a page in the standard size and 6.0c in the XL, so the larger cartridge is 28% more expensive per page. XL tells you how much ink is in the cartridge. It says nothing about what that ink will cost you per page, so on that family do the division before you pay.

What a colour page actually costs on each Epson

Cost per cartridge tells you very little. What matters is what it costs to put one page carrying all four colours through the machine, which is the black plus cyan plus magenta plus yellow figures added up. Here is that number for all 19 Epson families in our data that sell a full set, cheapest first, taking the best value tier in each colour.

Every bottle family beats every cartridge family, and not by a margin you can argue with. The cheapest cartridge family here is 802 at 7.7c a page, which is about 11 times the 0.69c that 104 bottles cost. The dearest, 200, comes in at 20.7c, roughly 30 times the cheapest bottle set.

That gap is the whole EcoTank pitch, and it is real, but it is not free. The printer costs more up front, and you only get the money back by printing enough pages to cover the difference. Our ink tank versus cartridge guide works out where that break even lands.

A curiosity worth knowing if you are shopping between two Epsons: 273 and 410 land on exactly the same 18.0c a page despite being different cartridges for different machines. Ink price is not a reason to pick between those two.

Third party ink and firmware, on an Epson

The Epson rows on our firmware lockout tracker split down the middle of Epson's own range, and this page said otherwise until September 2026. The cartridge models can block. Epson publishes no feature name to match HP's Dynamic Security, but it states that its cartridge printers are designed for Epson cartridges only and that some firmware updates may affect the functionality of third-party ink, and that sentence appears in the individual user guides too. EcoTank is the exception, and Epson is the one who says so, calling it an open system that does not prevent the use of non-OEM inkjet bottles. So when you are buying ink for an Epson, the number on the front tells you more than the brand does. An ET is an EcoTank and is fine. An XP or WF takes cartridges and carries the restriction.

On a cartridge model, that makes the update setting the thing to get right before you buy a stack of compatibles. Epson documents it: Auto Update Settings in the Windows printer software has a Never option, and the panel has its own firmware update setting. A compatible that dies within a day or two of the printer updating itself is the signature of this rather than a bad cartridge.

What you will get is a complaint. Fit a third party cartridge and the panel usually says the cartridge is not genuine, or that ink levels cannot be monitored, and asks you to confirm you want to carry on. Confirm it and the printer prints. The caveat is that the ink gauge stops being trustworthy from then on, so watch your output rather than the bar on the screen. Our Epson ink error guide has the button sequences, and does Epson block third party ink covers the one firmware caveat worth knowing about.

EcoTanks have their own version of this. Third party bottles physically work, since the ink goes into an open reservoir, but the printer counts pages rather than measuring the tank, so the software estimate drifts away from reality as soon as you top up with anything it did not expect. Look through the window on the front.

Common questions

Keep reading

• Does Epson block third party ink? the short answer, with the one caveat
• How to reset an Epson printer and clear an ink error
• Ink tank vs cartridge printers: is refillable worth it? where the EcoTank premium pays itself back
• The same chart for HP including which HP models lock out third party ink
• The same chart for Canon PG and CL against PGI and CLI
• The same chart for Brother TN, DR and LC numbers
• Firmware lockout tracker every printer we track, by whether it blocks third party ink
• What a page yield number really means what the page yield column on this chart is actually measuring.
• Is your cartridge number being discontinued? no Epson tank bottle is orphaned, which is not true of its cartridge numbers.
• Your cartridge is being discontinued: what to do about it moving to a tank machine, costed against staying on the cartridges.
• Is the XL cartridge actually cheaper? the Epson numbers priced in both sizes, including where no XL exists.

Sources

1. Epson, ink and toner finder, the manufacturer's own lookup of supplies by printer model. epson.com
2. Epson Europe ink consumables store, whose ink family filter lists the picture names Epson uses on European packaging, from Squirrel and Alarm clock to Pineapple, alongside the bottle families that carry numbers only. epson.eu
3. Internet Ink, on what the pictures on Epson cartridge boxes mean and why the same ink carries a different name in different regions. internet-ink.com
4. Yields quoted throughout are the manufacturer's ISO/IEC 24711 ratings as recorded in our own catalogue, and cost per page is that price divided by that yield. iso.org

Last updated 13 September 2026. This guide is general information, not a repair warranty. Printer menus and HP's model lists change, so confirm the exact steps for your model on the manufacturer's support site before you make changes.