Epson EcoTank ET-8500 Review: Six Inks, Very Cheap Pages

Most all-in-one printers are cheap to buy and expensive to own. Refillable ink-tank machines invert that: you pay considerably more up front, then refill from bottles for a fraction of what cartridges cost. The Epson EcoTank ET-8500 takes the idea further than most, because where a typical tank printer uses four inks, this one uses six — adding Photo Black and Grey specifically for photographic output.

Whether that maths works for you is almost entirely a question of how much you print.

The ET-8500 costs roughly twice what a comparable cartridge-based all-in-one does. Heavy users recoup that quickly, because a single fill goes an extraordinarily long way: around 22,000 text pages, over 9,000 colour graphic pages, or roughly 1,600 photos at 10x15 cm.

Put against a well-regarded cartridge printer from the same manufacturer, the per-page difference is stark:

A second independent assessment, testing on its own page set, put running costs at roughly 0.022 per colour page and 0.003 per mono page — different test pages, same conclusion. At these rates the paper becomes your largest consumable, not the ink.

Power draw is modest too: 14.9 W printing and 0.9 W in standby, working out to a couple of pounds a year in electricity under the test scenario used.

The extra Photo Black and Grey inks do what they are meant to. Quality measurements were convincing across the board, with the two additional inks delivering notably accurate rendering of brightness differences and high contrast in photographs. For an ink-tank printer, that level of photographic output is not a given.

Here the two independent assessments diverge, and it is worth knowing both. One rated print quality as essentially faultless. The other flagged an average delta E of 6.3 — colour drift it considered somewhat high for a machine sold specifically as a photo printer. Both agree the output is good; they disagree on whether it is good enough to call it a photo specialist without qualification. If you are printing for critical colour work rather than family albums, treat that figure as the one to check against your own expectations.

Tank printers have a reputation for being slow. This one is not.

A single text page arrived in 5 seconds, six pages in 23 seconds, and a colour graphic page in 40 seconds. A 10x15 cm photo took 1 minute 18. Those figures are comfortably quick enough that the printer suits ordinary office work rather than being a photo-only machine parked in a corner.

At 8.4 kg it weighs roughly double a budget EcoTank, and the difference in solidity is obvious. Paper handling is genuinely well thought out: a 100-sheet drawer that keeps sheets protected from dust and dog-ears, a further 50-sheet rear feed, and a dedicated tray for 10x15 cm photo paper so you are not swapping stock constantly. Double-sided printing is supported, which halves paper costs on longer documents.

The 10.9 cm touchscreen is large enough that menus and settings are actually readable — a meaningful difference from the cramped panels on cheaper machines. Connectivity covers both Ethernet and built-in Wi-Fi, so the printer does not have to live next to the computer.

Physically it measures 40.3 x 36.9 x 16.2 cm and comes in white, where its larger sibling is black.

The built-in scanner resolves at 813 ppi, high enough to digitise small originals with real detail. One notable omission: there is no transparency unit, so scanning slides or film negatives is not possible. If that is part of why you are buying a photo-focused all-in-one, this is the specification that rules it out.

This is the clearest weakness. Printing measured 12.5 sone, which places it among the mid-loud machines — audible enough to be a consideration in a shared room or home office. Scanning is much quieter at 3.1 sone. The second assessment independently flagged noise as elevated, so this is not a one-off measurement.

The ET-8500 tops out at A4. If you want larger output, the ET-8550 is the same machine in A3+ form, printing up to 32.9 x 48.3 cm, for a meaningful premium. That is a genuinely different product, so decide which paper size you need before buying rather than assuming you can work around it.

Buy it if you print in real volume — the economics only make sense once you are past the point where cartridge costs would have hurt — and if photographic output matters enough to justify six inks rather than four. The paper handling, speed and screen all make it a printer you can live with daily rather than tolerate.

Look elsewhere if you print occasionally, in which case you will never recover the higher purchase price. Skip it if you need A3+, if you need to scan film or slides, or if the printer will sit somewhere that 12.5 sone would be intrusive.

Truthful Reviews has not tested this printer. The figures above come from published testing by two independent European publications, both covering this exact model — the ET-8500, not the A3+ ET-8550 — and both recorded against this page as approved editorial provenance in machine-readable form. Where they disagree, as on colour accuracy, both positions are given rather than one being chosen.

We are not quoting a UK price for this printer. Amazon UK listings for the ET-8500 showed a price on the search results page but no working buy box on the product page, with no identifiable seller, condition or fulfilment information — so none of it met the standard we require before printing a figure. Rather than publish a number we cannot stand behind, we have omitted it.

Prices in this category move, and multiple listings for the same model sat within a few pounds of each other when we looked, so check current availability directly. Check Amazon UK availability or search on Amazon US