Which printers have refillable ink?
Three ranges: Epson EcoTank, Canon MegaTank and HP Smart Tank. All three replace the cartridge with a reservoir built into the printer, refilled from bottles. Cost per page falls to under a cent, and because a bottle has no chip there is nothing to authenticate.
“Refillable” here means designed to be refilled, not refilled by a workaround. These are printers sold with reservoirs and bottles, supported by the manufacturer, under warranty.
The three ranges
| Range | Ink | Black page | Color page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Epson EcoTank | 522, 502 or 552 bottles | ~0.4¢ to ~0.3¢ | ~1.1¢ |
| Canon MegaTank | GI-21 bottles | ~0.3¢ | ~0.8¢ |
| HP Smart Tank | 32XL and 31 bottles | not published | not published |
Our figures are arithmetic on bottle prices and manufacturer-rated yields read on 27 September 2026. HP’s yields are high — the highest color figures of the three — but we could not confirm a bottle price, so we publish no cost per page. The three-way comparison.
What refillable ink actually changes
The cost, by roughly twentyfold
A bottle has almost no packaging overhead. A 170 mL bottle rated for 6,000 pages costs about what a single high-yield cartridge does. Published figures put cartridge inkjet printing at about 7.5 cents a page for black against well under a cent here.
Who controls your supply
This is the part people often care about more once they understand it. A cartridge carries a chip, and on some printers that chip is used to verify the cartridge is the manufacturer’s. A bottle carries nothing. So the whole category of problem described in printer DRM cannot arise.
That is a structural exemption rather than a matter of trusting a brand, which makes it more durable than any corporate assurance.
What you pay up front
More. A tank printer costs meaningfully more than a comparable cartridge printer, and part of that is pre-paid ink — the bottles in the box last most households a long time. It is the reason a tank printer only pays off above a certain volume.
The catch, stated properly
There is a second, smaller catch: on many cartridge printers the print head is part of the cartridge, so a clog is fixed by buying a cartridge. On a tank printer the head is permanent, which makes a badly clogged one a service matter. Another reason the fortnightly page is worth it.
What about refilling cartridges yourself?
Physically possible on many cartridge printers, and not something we recommend or cover. The cartridge chip still reports levels and may still authenticate, refill kits are messy, and yields are unknowable — so we could not publish a cost per page for it even if we wanted to.
A printer designed to be refilled solves the same problem without any of that.
Third-party bottles
Nothing stops you: there is no chip in a bottle, so any ink that fits will go in. We do not publish cost-per-page figures for third-party ink because its yields are not rated to the ISO standard, and it is worth noticing that the manufacturers’ own bottles are already under a cent a page. The remaining saving is small and the variable you are trading is warranty rather than money.
Which to buy
- Most households: Epson EcoTank ET-2800.
- Lowest running cost, documents that get handled: Canon MegaTank G3270.
- Long documents: an EcoTank that duplexes, such as the ET-2850.
- Photographs: a six-color photo tank printer.
- You scan stacks: an EcoTank with a document feeder.