Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500 Review: A Photo Supertank, Priced for Photo Printers

Updated June 18, 2026

Print Speed Up to 16 ISO ppm black, color photo output focus

Functions Print, scan, copy (six-ink photo all-in-one)

Connectivity Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Ethernet, 4.3-inch color touchscreen

Ink System Cartridge-free Claria ET Premium six-bottle refillable tanks

Our Verdict

The ET-8500 is the photo-first EcoTank, and on photos it earns its 4.2-star record — the six-ink Claria set delivers borderless prints at bottle-ink cost that a cartridge photo printer can't match over time. The catch is the use case, not the output. Buy it to print pictures and craft projects often and the premium sticker turns into the cheapest photo printing you can do at home. Buy it for documents and you've overpaid for inks you'll barely touch; print rarely and the idle-clog risk this fixed printhead carries turns against you. Pay the photo premium on purpose, keep it printing, and feed the driver the right paper type.

Best for: Photo and craft households that print borderless pictures often and want store-quality output at refill-bottle running cost rather than drugstore-print prices.

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Video Review

Watch on YouTube · Milly | Creative Business Owner

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Overview

The supertank you buy to print pictures

Most EcoTanks exist to make documents cheap. The ET-8500 exists to make photos cheap. It is the photo-first model in Epson's tank line, built around Epson's Claria ET Premium 6-color ink rather than the four inks a document supertank runs — two extra colors aimed squarely at skin tones, skies, and gradients. That single fact reframes the whole review: judge it on prints, not on pages.

The lens this site puts on every machine still holds — not the sticker, but the running-cost math of what a printer actually costs to own over time. The ET-8500 applies refill economics to the most expensive home-printing habit there is: drugstore photo prints, or a cartridge photo printer that drains color faster than you can reload it. Print pictures in volume and bottle ink rewrites that math.

Across the 13 owner reviews, satisfaction splits sharply, and not on quality. One end sounds like the buyer this machine was made for:

Best Use Case: If, like us, your printing needs are 80% creative — artwork and photos — one owner writes, the printer earns its keep. The other end bought it to print documents and met a premium they never use up.

What the six-ink spec sheet actually buys

The headline number is the ink count. Epson markets the ET-8500 as Ditch cartridges and embrace revolutionary ink savings — the standard tank pitch — but the six-color set is what separates it from a document EcoTank. More colors mean smoother photo gradients, the payoff this tier charges for. On the desk you also get a Navigate printing like a pro with 4.3-inch touchscreen, and connectivity is broad: Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct plus a wired Ethernet port.

It is a real all-in-one, not just a photo box. Epson rates it to Print stunning photos, personalized gifts, and presentations across a wide media range — The 8500 prints 8.5x11 and 8.5x14 as well as smaller 8x10, 5x7, and 4x6 sizes, plus printable discs. And it does borderless: Epson pitches Challenge your artistic boundaries with edge-to-edge printing, the format that makes a home print look store-bought.

The marketing leans on a superiority narrative, and the owner record partly earns it. Epson's claim that Rich, vibrant colors pop from the page held up for 11 of 13 reviewers against two who disagreed — a strong ratio, but not unanimous. We weigh exactly this kind of claim against the owner record in our inkjet comparison criteria.

Performance & Real-World Testing

The photos are the point, and they deliver

Photo output is the calm, consistent praise in the record. Owners single out prints on photo stock above every other feature, and the six-ink set is the reason — it resolves color depth a four-ink document machine cannot. For borderless prints on glossy paper, the page that comes out is where this machine justifies its tier.

There is a durability edge over cheaper photo printers too. As one community owner puts it, on a budget machine Otherwise your photo prints will fade pretty quickly — the ET-8500's better ink resists that fade far longer, which matters for prints you frame rather than file. Epson's own EcoTank photo-printing specs lean on that longevity, and for once the owner record backs the brand.

Glossy wins, matte loses, and color needs calibration

Now the honest limits. Prints are paper-sensitive: a community owner reports no water resistance, not so good for matte papers and clearly better results on glossy stock. So this is a glossy-photo machine first. The color is not plug-and-play either — one owner is blunt that Prints are great, but need to calibrate for your paper., using a hardware profiler to get there.

And there is a quiet driver trap. Black ink can smudge if the wrong paper type is set, because The type of paper you use and tell it that you are using decides which black ink the printer lays down. Tell the driver the truth about your stock and the problem disappears; ignore it and you waste sheets learning the lesson.

Where it trails the dedicated photo printers

The ceiling is real. At a similar price, Epson's SureColor photo line uses more inks for finer color — a community owner notes these could use 8-10 different ink cartridges for good color accuracy where the ET-85xx uses six. For a pro chasing gallery-grade accuracy, that gap is the reason to spend up. For a home printing family photos and craft projects at bottle-ink cost, six inks is plenty — and far cheaper to feed than a cartridge photo printer. We map that fork across the catalog in our type-versus-type tradeoffs analysis.

Value Analysis

Dear to buy, cheap to feed — if you print photos

Here's the thing about a photo supertank: the trap runs the opposite way from a budget printer. A cheap cartridge machine is cheap to buy and brutal to feed. The ET-8500 is the reverse — it sits in the premium price tier, then quietly stops charging you. Compared to the cartridge photo printers most homes start with, the ink in the box lasts, and a refill set is a fraction of what they cost over the same number of prints.

That is the whole economic case. Drugstore prints and cartridge photo printers tax you per picture; bottle ink does not. Independent testing puts cartridge cost-per-page many times higher than tank ink — RTINGS' cost-per-print and page-yield testing measures the gap directly, and Consumer Reports' inkjet running-cost testing reaches the same verdict. A supertank front-loads the savings into a steep sticker and pays them back over months of printing.

The volume-and-content test

So the value verdict turns on two questions, not one: how much you print, and what. Print photos often and the ET-8500 is honestly excellent value — store-quality borderless prints at bottle-ink cost, no per-picture tax. Print rarely, or print mostly text, and the premium is wasted.

The ink count you paid for has to leave the machine to earn its keep.

We grade every machine against that running-cost case in our inkjet printers evidence hub.

What to Expect Over Time

Living with it: idle clogs are the real risk

One failure mode shapes life with any EcoTank, and the photo models are no exception: the printhead clogs when the machine sits idle.

Liquid ink hardens in a fixed printhead that goes unused, and the machine spends ink on cleaning cycles to clear it. A community owner is blunt — Epsons clog easily if left unused — and the warning goes further: if you only print occasionally, these are NOT the printers to get, because idle ink can wreck the head outright. Print something in color every week or two and it rarely bites. Leave it dark for a month between holiday photo runs and you can meet a clog the evening you need a print. We track that idle-clog risk in our safety and known-risks guidance.

The flip side is in the record too: owners who keep the machine working report no trouble. Over the course of several months, one owner ran photos plus thousands of documents and was still on the ink that shipped in the box; another with the narrower ET-8500 went through idle stretches with no blockage or missing color. The pattern is consistent — regular use is the whole insurance policy on a tank printhead.

Keep it busy and the clog risk all but disappears.

Setup is easier than a photo printer should be

The reassuring surprise sits against that clog risk. A photo-capable refill printer sounds fiddly to set up; the owner verdict is the opposite. One reviewer working through the unboxing reports This turns out to be just as easy as promised. — the tank fill and first-print process going smoothly, not the ordeal expected. That low friction is exactly what makes the photo-at-home economics worth committing to.

It is not flawless. A minority hit Epson's software: one owner reports The Epson Apps (Epson Smart Panel & Epson Creative Print) can never find the printer, locking them out of app-based printing, and another goes further — This is quite possibly the worst printer they had used, faulting Epson support that never followed through. Those are the outliers in a mostly happy 4.2-star record, but they are the risk to weigh if app printing matters to you.