EPSON’s new printer is a game changer
We use the term game changer a lot for phones, PCs and tablets, but almost never for printers. For good reason – printers have almost always had the same concept – you use up the ink cartridge, you buy a new one. Rinse and repeat. That gets annoying after a while, and even offices and companies that have the budget to keep buying and replacing those inks place sometimes draconian limits (no colored prints without authorization!) on their use to save money.
EPSON’s about to change that with their new EcoTank printers. These new printers (which start from $379 or Php 17.3K) already have almost two year’s worth of ink inside of them when you buy them, which is a far cry from the traditional “starter pack” ink cartridges that other companies offer. That’s enough for 11,000 black pages, or up to 8,500 color pages. The ink is stored in ink tanks in the printers, which you can refill. Not that you’ll need to – the printers have so much ink in them that you can print pages upon pages of that terrible Harry Potter fan fiction with enough left over for more useful things.
The tradeoff is that the printers are more expensive than typical models, but some people prefer to pay the higher, up-front cost of buying these printers than contend with going to the mall to get new inks when they really need them. Just like EPSON’s other models, these new printers connect to your network wirelessly and has print, copy and scanning capabilities.
With their new printers, EPSON is now charging you for the printer, not the ink. The old razorblade model of doing business is now changing.
EDIT: We reached out to EPSON PH for clarification, apparently they already launched these printers in the PH (with different model names), though the amount of pre-loaded inks that EPSON PH offers is less, explaining the lower price. The US version has two sets of inks that’s roughly equal to two years, while the PH version only has enough for around a year’s worth.
