Most people will know of 2 printer types, Ink Jet and Laser.
Inkjet printers use 2-6 ink cartridges which you replace when they run out, this is the type of printer most people have in their home and usually have a reputation for being cheap printers to buy but expensive to run.
Laser printers are a less common and use Toners, basically long cartridges full of coloured powder, most people would see them in a work office. Laser printers are good for high volume fast printing and can work out at a low cost per page. The downside is when you need to replace the toners and sometimes the drums inside, the price will easily be in the £100s.
What is an EcoTank printer then?
They work in the same way as a regular ink jet printer does but instead of ink cartridges they have refillable tanks, usually on the front or on the side. The advantage to this is instead of buying a sets of ink cartridges that will print a few 100 pages each time, a bottle of ink can be bought that will do 1000s of pages each time.
For example:
Our compatible Black 603XL ink cartridges for Epson's do an estimated 600 pages each
Our compatible Black 104 ink bottle for Epson's do an estimated 4500 pages each.
So it would take 7.5 ink cartridges to do the same amount of prints as 1 bottle.
Each cartridge costs £8 which makes it £60 to do approx 4500 pages
1 bottle of ink costs £5
Thats saving £55 on just the 1 colour, both of the printers that use these cartridges/bottles use 4 colours.
Taking that into account you would need 30 ink cartridges to do the same amount of prints as 4 bottle (1 for each colour of ink)
That would save £220 over using cartridges.
So how much is the printer?
They start at £189 (Epson ET1810) and include a set of ink bottles with them.
If you plan on doing a large amount of printing or print regularly these printers offer the best value printing without high running costs.