Epson 114 single bottles Epson EcoTank ET-8500

The EcoTank ET-8500 is the A4 photo printer Epson introduced the 114 series with, in 2021. Where an ordinary EcoTank has four tanks, this machine has six, and those two extra tanks are exactly what decides what you need to buy: alongside cyan, magenta and yellow there are two kinds of black and a grey.

The pigment black tank (BK, part number C13T07A140) is there for text. Pigment ink sits on top of the paper instead of soaking into it, which is why letters stay sharp and do not feather on ordinary printer paper. The photo black tank (PBK, C13T07B140) is dye ink and does soak in, which gives a far deeper black on photo paper. The printer picks between the two itself, based on the paper you select.

The grey tank (GY, C13T07B540) is the reason black and white photographs out of this machine look different from those out of a four-colour printer. Without a grey, a printer has to fake light grey tones by spacing black dots further apart, which shows as grain and often as a colour cast. With a real grey ink those tones are simply printed.

Each tank takes one 70ml bottle, and one bottle fills a completely empty tank. Epson rates a bottle at roughly 2,300 pages at 5% coverage on A4. Printing photographs, where the whole sheet gets covered, goes through it far faster: expect a few hundred sheets rather than thousands.