There was a time when instead of buying new ink cartridges, it worked out cheaper to buy a new printer!
Since the advent of refillable ink cartridges, ink technology is now taking us to refillable ink tank printers like the Epson EcoTank ET-M1170 black pigment ink printer, which refills via ink bottles.
Each ink bottle contains 120ml of black ink, which is enough to fill up the ink tank reservoir inside the printer. The page yield per ink bottle is up to 11,000 pages. The type of ink used by the printer is pigment ink, which performs better than dye-based ink at not fading away or easily being smudged.
Being a black pigment ink printer, the EcoTank ET-M1170 can print as small as 2.8 pl (picoliter) ink droplets so, the printer has small nozzles, which are great for sharp printouts.
However, the drawback of using pigment ink with small nozzles is that the nozzles can get easily clogged up because of the composition of pigment ink. Since the EcoTank ET-M1170 only uses black pigment ink though, clogging may not be as much of an issue as color pigment ink and black pigment ink mixing together.
The included CD is required for setting up the EcoTank ET-M1170 printer for the first time as the CD contains the driver that the printer needs to allow the EcoTank ET-M1170 printer and a computer to communicate and print.
Even if you have other Epson printers, you will still need to use the included CD because all the different Epson printer models, including the EcoTank ET-M1170 black pigment ink printer, use different and specific drivers.
The printer should be off during the ink filling process. After filling the ink tank with the included ink bottle, you will need to turn the printer on and press the inverted triangle button for 5 seconds.
The power light will start flashing, which indicates that the ink is charging. The ink light should be off but it will light up if there is an error during the "ink charging" process, or when the ink in the tank is low.
Aside from being able to print with the Epson EcoTank ET-M1170 when connected to a wireless router, you can also print directly from a smartphone or tablet via WiFi Direct, which is built-in to the printer.
Your smartphone or tablet also has to support Wifi Direct in order to be able to communicate with the EcoTank ET-M1170. For printing remotely, you need to use either Google cloud printing services or Epson cloud printing services.
Speaking of wireless printing, you should know that wireless printing is not secure by default; hence why you should get a printer that encrypts all data sent over wireless connections.
Most printers, at the very least, use Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), but you ideally want a printer that supports Wifi Protected Access (WPA/WPA2), which is more secure than WEP.
The EcoTank ET-M1170 uses WEP (WEP 64 Bit and WEP 128 Bit), as well as WPA PSK (TKIP) and WPA2 PSK (AES). The latter one is the most secure and the one you really want to use to prevent hackers from saving copies of the documents you print.
To make sure that the EcoTank ET-M1170 prints wirelessly using WPA, you need to turn on WPA from your router and configure your computers and smart devices to use WPA. This is very easyly done with current operating systems, including Linux, Android, iOS, Windows and MacOS.
As long as you are running Windows Vista and above , and Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and above, configuring WPA is straightforward.
With this said, the Epson EcoTank ET-M1170 printer is not compatible with Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard). The oldest MacOS version that is compatible with this printer is Mac OS X 10.6.8.
For Windows computers, the oldest version compatible with the EcoTank ET-M1170 printer is Windows Vista (released in 2006) and Windows XP SP3 (released in 2008). The ET-M1170 printer is not compatible with the Windows XP version released in 2001.
Noise levels for this printer are average, at around 50dB, going up to 69dB (fairly loud) when using Photo RPM mode, which delivers the highest printing quality resolution (approx. 5760 dpi) when using premium glossy photo paper.
When using Photo RPM mode, printing is very slow as the printer carefully optimizes the dot placement by size. The default resolution of the printer is 1,200 DPI by 2,400 DPI.
While there is no on-board screen display like you get with the XP-15000 Expression Photo, WorkForce DS-870 and the XP-422 cartridge printers, you still get access to key printer settings via four buttons. You can carry out a nozzle check, print head cleaning, network connection reports, restoring network settings to default, and connect the printer to a wireless router or smart device.