Everything below comes from two places: Epson’s own product and ink pages, read on 27 September 2026, and arithmetic on those figures. We do not have this printer in front of us, and nothing on this page should be read as though we did.
What it costs to run
The ET-2800 takes Epson 522 ink. A epson 522 black ink bottle was listed at $17.99 and is rated at 4,500 ISO pages; each color bottle was $17.99 and rated at 7,500. That gives roughly 0.4¢ for a black page and 1.1¢ for a four-color one.
For context, published industry figures put a cartridge inkjet at around seven and a half cents for black. The ET-2800 is therefore not a bit cheaper to feed than a cartridge printer; it is in a different bracket entirely, and that is the only reason to accept its higher sticker price.
| If you print | Ink over 3 years | Total with the printer |
|---|---|---|
| 25 pages a month | $4 | $244 |
| 75 pages a month | $11 | $251 |
| 200 pages a month | $29 | $269 |
Supplies only in the middle column; sticker price plus supplies in the right one. Mono pages at the manufacturer’s rated yield and the supply price we read on 27 September 2026. Real cost runs higher because rated yields assume 5% page coverage. The full method.
Read the right-hand column carefully, because it is the argument against this printer as well as for it. At 25 pages a month almost the entire three-year cost is the printer itself — the ink is close to a rounding error, and so is the saving over any other machine. At 200 pages a month the ink cost is still trivial, and that is where the purchase makes obvious sense.
What you give up
Two things, and the first one is the reason to consider spending more.
No automatic two-sided printing
The ET-2800 will not duplex on its own. At roughly a cent a sheet, paper costs more than the ink does on this printer — genuinely, by a factor of two or three — so the machine that halves your paper use is saving you more than the machine with the cheaper bottle. If you print multi-page documents at all regularly, the ET-2850 with its duplexer is the better buy despite the higher price.
Flatbed scanner only
No document feeder. Fine if you scan a page occasionally, tedious if you scan stacks. The ET-4800 adds a feeder and Ethernet on the same 522 ink, so the running cost is identical and you are only paying for hardware.
Does it need a subscription?
No. EcoTank models are filled from bottles you buy outright. Epson does sell a supply subscription for its cartridge printers, which is a different product line; nothing about owning an ET-2800 involves a plan, an account or a page allowance.
Because there is no cartridge, there is also no chip for firmware to reject — which is the practical reason bottle-fed printers keep appearing at the top of the third-party ink question.
Who should buy something else
- You print fewer than about twenty pages a month. Buy a mono laser. You will never recover the extra sticker price, and an inkjet left idle for months is the one thing most likely to let you down.
- You print long documents. The ET-2850 duplexes; this does not.
- You scan a lot. The ET-4800 has a document feeder and wired Ethernet.
- You want the absolute lowest cost per page. The Canon MegaTank G3270 came out lower on both mono and color in our figures, and its pigment black smudges less.
- Photographs are the main reason you are buying. This is a four-color printer built for documents. A six-color photo tank printer is a different tool.
Where it lands
If your household prints in color and prints regularly, the ET-2800 is the easy recommendation and has been the default answer in this category for several years. If your printing is sporadic and black-only, we would rather you bought a laser and we would rather say so.