Which ink does the Epson EcoTank ET-2710 use?

The Epson EcoTank ET-2710 has no cartridges at all. You refill four built-in tanks from Epson 104 ink bottles, sold singly in black, cyan, magenta and yellow. There is no chip to be recognized and nothing to click into place, which removes most of the ways a cartridge inkjet goes wrong.

This is where an EcoTank earns back the extra you paid for the hardware. A 104 black bottle is rated at about 4500 pages and lists near $11, which is about 0.2 cents a page. Each color bottle is rated at about 7500 pages for the same $11, closer to 0.15 cents. A cartridge inkjet in the same size class typically costs several cents a page, so the ink on this printer is close to a rounding error and the only thing left to weigh is whether you print enough to earn back the purchase price.

There is no firmware lock to worry about. Epson does not block non-OEM ink on the EcoTank line and says as much itself, calling EcoTank an open system that does not prevent the use of non-OEM inkjet bottles, so the tanks will take any compatible 104 bottle you pour into them. Genuine bottles are cheap enough that third-party ink saves very little here, and cheap ink in a printer with a permanent printhead is a poor trade. This is one of the few printers where we would just buy the Epson bottles and not think about it again.

The failure mode to watch is the head. On the ET-2710 the printhead is fixed in the printer, so a bad clog cannot be cleared by swapping a cartridge the way it can on a cartridge machine. Printing something in color every week or two is nearly all the prevention it needs. If output goes blank or striped, run a nozzle check first, top up any tank that is low, and bear in mind that a tank run completely dry can pull air into the line, which sometimes needs the ink charging routine repeated to clear.