Epson has launched its EcoTank series of printers, which turns the current printer market on its head, charging far more for the printer itself, but shipping it with enough ink that if you have light to moderate print needs, you'll rarely, if ever, have have to buy more ink. Could this mean the end of seductively cheap inkjet printers that require years worth of painfully pricey ink cartridges? 

The Epson WorkForce ET-4550 EcoTank All-in-One, for example, which I'm in the process of reviewing, substitutes bottles of ink for cartridges, and comes with enough for a whopping 11,000 black pages if you print in monochrome only, or 8,500 color pages, using the ISO/IEC standard test pages for determining yield. In a micro or home office that prints 10 pages per day on average, five days a week, that works out to more than three years' worth of ink in color and four years in black.

As a point of comparison, consider the Epson WorkForce WF-2650, which Epson says is essentially the same printer, except that it uses traditional ink cartridges. At $499.99, the ET-4550 costs about four times as much as the WF-2650's list price of $129.99. Add up the total cost of ownership, however, and the ET-4550 can be the cheaper printer by far, even if you treat the WF-2650 as free in your calculations.

The WF-2650 comes with standard-capacity cartridges with enough ink for 175 monochrome pages or 165 color pages. Additional sets of high-capacity cartridges offer yields of 500 pages for black and 450 pages per cartridge for color. That means you need roughly 22 high-capacity black cartridges and 57 high-capacity color cartridges (19 of each color) to print as many pages as you can with the ET-4550 using just the pre-installed ink.

At $29.99 for a black cartridge and $16.99 for each color cartridge, that works out to well over $1,600 for the WF-2650's ink. Even if you find a lower price or buy third-party ink, it's highly unlikely that you'll bring the cost down low enough to match the $499.99 total cost for the ET-4550.

All of which sounds great. At the risk of sounding like more of a naysayer than I mean to be, however, there are some issues you'll want to consider before you make an EcoTank printer your preferred choice.

First, pouring ink from bottles into the tanks inside the printer can get messy. One of the more memorable lines from a PC Magazine Printer Blockbuster review in the early 1980s was that it's not often we get to wear the products we're reviewing, referring to ink that wound up on the reviewer's hands. It's more than a little ironic that the change that took inkjets past that problem then was the move to cartridges to eliminate mess, while Epson's big step forward now is to return to pouring ink from bottles.

If you've been using third-party ink refill kits, Epson's approach will probably be an improvement on this score. But if you're used to just snapping in a cartridge, be forewarned that you're going to need latex gloves when you set up the printer—Epson doesn't provide any—and will need to be careful not to spill anything. If you're setting one up at home, you'll also want to guard against getting "help" from young children and inquisitive small animals, like the family cat.

Second, once you've set up the printer, moving it can also get messy. Epson warns that you can spill ink if you tilt it too far, much less put it on its side or turn it upside down. That limits the EcoTank models' usefulness if you need a printer that can travel to and from dorm rooms, for example, and it could be a problem if you move.

One pleasant surprise is that when you finally run out of the initial supply of ink, buying more doesn't represent much of a financial commitment. That means you won't have to worry about how much longer you're going to keep the printer before you decide to buy more ink. The price on Epson's website for a bottle of black ink with a 6,000-page yield is only $19.49. The price for cyan, yellow, and magenta bottles, with a 4,500-page yield for each, is $12.99 per color. That's a lot cheaper than most cartridges, not to mention a lot more ink.

I'm guessing that for most people—for home and office printers—the savings in ink cost will more than make up for the minor issues involved in pouring ink rather than snapping in cartridges. If so, this may turn out to be the future for inkjets in general. And if other manufacturers take the same approach, it will be interesting to see how long the market for third-party ink stays around. That said, it's still ironic that Epson's major innovation is to pour ink from bottles, just like we used to do before ink cartridges eliminated the mess and helped inkjets became popular.