Which ink does the Epson EcoTank ET-16500 use?

The Epson EcoTank ET-16500 is cartridge free. Ink arrives in Epson 664 bottles and gets poured into tanks on the side of the machine, and our record lists four of them: black rated at 4000 pages and cyan, magenta and yellow at 6500 pages each. Those two numbers are black against colour, not a standard against a high yield version. There is no XL bottle to choose and no size decision to make.

The price of ink is the reason to put up with a tank printer. Every bottle lists at $13.00, so a black page costs 0.33 cents and a colour page 0.20 cents, and refilling every tank comes to $52.00. At the other end of our catalogue a cartridge machine running the HP 65XL black prints at 12.33 cents a page, and that gap is what the tank design buys.

The trade is a higher price at the till and a maintenance habit. Tank machines are dearer to buy and they want regular use, because the print head is fixed in the body and stays there for the life of the printer. Epson builds these around a Micro Piezo head and describes it as permanent, so there is no cartridge swap that hands you clean nozzles when things go wrong.

Epson's own cautions on its heaviest Power Cleaning routine are blunt: it consumes a lot of ink, every tank has to be at least a third full or the cleaning can damage the machine, running it can bring the ink pads to the end of their service life sooner, and you should wait at least twelve hours before running another. Printing a page or two a week costs less ink than one of those cycles.

Nothing in the firmware refuses third party ink. Our tracker has the ET-16500 as open and it takes genuine and compatible bottles alike. The risk with cheap bottles is not a chip rejecting you, it is what a poor ink does over time to a head you cannot replace, so buy from a seller with a real reputation and keep the machine printing.