We all know about those inkjet printers that are incredibly cheap to buy and seem unfeasibly good value. You pay your money, take it home and install it, only to find that the ‘setup’ cartridges run out a few days later and a full set of regular replacement cartridges costs as much as (if not more than) the printer itself. Suddenly they don’t seem such good value after all. The ET-8500 takes the opposite approach. The initial purchase cost is a lot more expensive but it has ‘EcoTanks’ instead of cartridges, which are replenished by bottles of ink. By sharp contrast, the ET-8500 ships with enough ink for creating 2,300 6x4-inch color photos. That can make it much cheaper to run in the long term and can save you bigtime on the ‘total cost of ownership’, if you print in reasonably high volumes. It takes a worthy place as one of the best Epson printers, in a line-up that includes some of the best inkjet printers, the best portable printers, and the best photo printers.
