The nice thing about the EcoTanks is that they come with a LOT of ink. My printer came with enough ink that if I was using it in a fine art print shop, it would have paid for itself 100x over.

... but there's still plenty of room for money-making racket unless you get one with a user-emptyable waste ink tank. (end of advice)

My ET-14000 apparently has 11 ink-absorbent pads in the base which are fed ink used when cleaning the jets. The printer kept track of how much ink was pumped away and then refused to do anything until it was emptied. I found the service manual and to reach the pads I would have had to disassemble the entire printer, including all sorts of tape and instructions as to how many Newtons tight each screw should be. Oh, and if I got Epson to do it, that wouldn't be done under warranty because I had used all sorts of non-Epson inks. Day-glo and invisible UV ink is cool!

Anyways, I got a 'printer potty' which is an external waste ink tank, and a fairly reasonable product: of course I could have made my own, but they had done all my homework for me (including telling me which way the ink flows, which is not obvious, and would have been very messy if I'd done it backwards).

Then here comes the racket: To reset the waste ink counter, which can only be done by special Epson software, I can instead pay €10 per reset per serial number to some clever Ukrainians who have reverse-engineered all that Epson software.

Fortunately I was able to pirate the Epson software and do it myself, but ... sheesh!

The fun part is I'm going to filter all of my waste ink back into the black tanks and then watercolor over wet prints, expecting some neat results there.

I've heard that their ink fades to near-illegibility in only a couple of years. Anyone know if there's anything to that?

I have an Epson ET-2650 printer/scanner combo. It's OK. The main problem is that if I don't print anything for a week, I have to run the cleaning procedure several times before it will print again.

As for fading, one sheet that's been outdoors for two years has faded about 75%, but nothing not exposed to bright sunlight has.

Runs OK on Linux over WiFi. Used to also work on USB, but that stopped working reliably at Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Also, on WiFi it phones home and tries to download firmware updates.

The problem with ink printers of all kinds is that they dry out. Your laser printer can sit unused for 2 years, then you turn it on and get impeccable print-outs. I'm not going to babysit my printer just to make sure there are no problems when I need a quick print-out, that's just unnecessary hassle.

What is needed to repair this printer when they dry out? Every ink printer I had dried out some day. Is this a solved problem nowadays?

The problem with Epson is that their printers are so fragile. I've had two die from a paper jam (one never worked again, one always fed the paper at an skew).

So I ended up with lots of ink in the trash in the end.