Epson EcoTank printer does away with ink cartridges, opts for DIY refills

[MUSIC] This might look like your standard ink jet printer, but it's hiding a big secret that could save you tons of cash. I'm Justin with cnet, and this is a first look at the Epson EcoTank ET 2550. When you lift up the lid on this side, you won't find the traditional ink jet cartridges that most printers use. Instead the ecotank series comes with a set of ink and bottles that you empty yourself into a large refillable reservoir. Now you are probably wondering about the benefits of this new ink delivery system. And here's the thing. Each bottle that comes with this printer has enough ink to print about 4000 pages of black ink and 6500 of color. And that equates to about the same as a two years supply The catch though is that Epson wants you to pay a much more for the printer itself. The ET2550 is the cheapest in the eco tank line and it costs $399 And [UNKNOWN]. So basically Epson is asking you to commit yourself to this printer for as long as it takes to offset the high retail price. But if you can stick with that the benefit is that after two years you can pick up a new set of ink bottles for super cheap. It's only 13 bucks for each bottle. That's about $52 for the set. Let's compare that to a non-eco tank Epson printer that costs 50 bucks retail. But the cartridges only last 175 pages, and refills cost 40 bucks for a full set. Aside from the eco tank the rest of the unit is pretty typical of a $100 printer. It has print, scan, and copy functionalities and even though there's no touch screen. You can walk up to it and plug in an sd card from your digital camera for direct photo prints. Better still it can connect to a wi-fi network to pull print jobs from the cloud. Not to mention Epson's own mobile app for outputting stuff off your smartphone. So, who is this printer really good for? Well, you can save a lot of money, potentially, on ink cartridges or refills here, but you'll have to wait until you exceed the cost of the retail price first, which will probably take a few years, and if you don't need a lot of extra features, and don't mind keeping this printer around for awhile, it really could be worth your dollar. You can check out more details and my full review on CNET, but that's gonna do it for me. I'm Justin, you just took a first look at the Epson Eco tank ET2550 ink jet printer. Thanks for watching. [MUSIC]