Which refillable tank printer system is best?
Canon MegaTank has the lowest cost per page we calculated and a pigment black that suits documents. Epson EcoTank has by far the broadest range and dye ink that suits photographs. HP Smart Tank is genuinely bottle-fed but we could not confirm a bottle price, so we publish no cost figure for it.
All three systems solve the same problem the same way: replace the chipped cartridge with a refillable reservoir and a bottle. The differences are in the ink chemistry, the bottle sizes, and how much hardware each range offers.
How we decided this
We priced every bottle we could and computed cost per page from the manufacturers’ own rated yields. For Canon we used the default-print-mode yield rather than the economy-mode figure, because default mode is what most people print in and the higher number would flatter the system.
Where a price could not be read from a manufacturer or a named retailer, no figure is published. That applies to HP Smart Tank throughout this site, and it is the reason it appears third here rather than being ranked on an estimate.
Cost per page, where we could compute it
| System | Black bottle | Color bottle | Black page | Color page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canon MegaTank (GI-21) | 6,000 pages, $17.99 | 7,700 pages, $12.99 | ~0.3¢ | ~0.8¢ |
| Epson EcoTank (502) | 7,500 pages, $24.99 | 6,000 pages, $16.99 | ~0.3¢ | ~1.2¢ |
| Epson EcoTank (522) | 4,500 pages, $17.99 | 7,500 pages, $17.99 | ~0.4¢ | ~1.1¢ |
| HP Smart Tank (32XL / 31) | 6,000 pages, price unconfirmed | 8,000 pages, price unconfirmed | not published | not published |
Yields from the manufacturers’ own pages; prices read on 27 September 2026 from the sources at the foot of this page. HP’s yields are high — the highest color figures here — which makes the missing price genuinely frustrating rather than convenient for us. Our method.
Note that HP has the highest rated color yields of any system in the table. If its bottles are priced comparably, Smart Tank would be competitive on color. We do not know, and saying so is more useful than guessing.
The ink chemistry difference that actually matters
Canon’s MegaTank black is a pigment ink; Epson’s entry-level EcoTank blacks are dye. Pigment sits on the paper surface, dye soaks in.
- Documents: pigment wins. Crisper text on plain paper, and much better smudge and water resistance for anything handled or carried.
- Photographs: dye wins. Deeper blacks and smoother gradients, because the ink is in the glossy coating rather than on it.
That single distinction is a better basis for choosing between MegaTank and EcoTank than the fraction of a cent between their bottle prices.
Range, which decides it for a lot of buyers
Epson has the broadest tank range on sale by some distance. If you want automatic duplexing, a document feeder, wired Ethernet, fax, or wide-format six-color photo printing, there is an EcoTank that has it. Canon’s tank range is smaller, and we could not confirm a duplexer on the model we cover.
For a buyer who knows they need a specific feature, that breadth frequently outweighs Canon’s cost advantage. It is also why our EcoTank coverage is deeper: there is more of it to cover.
What all three share, and it is the important part
No chip. Ink arrives in a bottle with no electronics in it, so on any of these systems there is no authentication step, nothing for a firmware update to reject, and no possibility of the situation described in printer DRM.
That applies to HP Smart Tank as much as to the others, which is worth saying clearly: HP’s Dynamic Security is a cartridge mechanism and has nothing to do with its tank printers.