The ink tank design looks good, helps protect the planet, and saves you an absolute bundle on cartridges. While the ET-2710 is more expensive than other base-level multifunctional printers, this means that the regular home user probably won’t need to even consider a refill for at least a couple of years, making this easy value for money. Read more: 8 best home office desks that will transform your work set-up Once the ink is in, there’s enough to produce up to 4,500 pages in mono and 7,500 pages in colour. The see-through front to each tank is a vital indicator for when ink is running low but also serves to add a spot of colour to the sleek, black colour way of the printer. Turning the bottle upside down, it connects neatly with the tank and stops automatically when the tank is full, with no need for squeezing. The process of filling up the tanks is easy and oddly satisfying: the resealable and drip-free ink bottles that come with the printer have heads that fit only with the corresponding colour tank, meaning no dropped stomach when you realise you’ll now have to put up with a yellow-tinged cyan for the rest of the printer’s lifetime. The refillable ink tanks, neatly placed at the front right of the printer, aren’t just a decorative addition: Epson says that by using tanks instead of notoriously expensive cartridges, users can save up to 90 per cent on ink costs, and the tanks can hold the equivalent of 72 cartridges’ worth of ink. For an ecotank with a screen, go for the ET-2710’s slightly pricier screened relative, the ET-2720 (£179.99, .uk). It also means that the print speed can be ramped up a notch while sticking to the printer’s lower price. There’s no screen, which makes life a little less straightforward, and double-sided printing is a manual effort, but the Epson iPrint app offers a neat, simple experience that helps you with most tasks. All of Epson’s ecotank printers use inkjet technology as opposed to laser, which both saves energy (and cuts down on heat) and produces quicker printed pages, needing no initial heating in the process. This is a compact, good-looking machine, but still has space for 100 pages in the input tray and 30 printed pages in the output tray. Printing speed: 10 pages/min monochrome, 5 pages/min colour.

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