Epson EcoTank ET-2980 review

Who it’s for

The Epson EcoTank ET-2980 is for homes that print a steady mix of documents, schoolwork and the occasional photo, and are tired of buying cartridges. You fill its tanks from bottles, and the ink in the box is rated for thousands of pages. PCMag names it the best all-in-one inkjet for homes, and RTINGS picks it as its best small printer. It’s a simple flatbed all-in-one: if you scan stacks of paper, you’ll want a model with a document feeder.

What’s new

The ET-2980 launched in March 2025 as the first of Epson’s seventh-generation EcoTanks. Compared with the ET-2850 it replaces, Epson rates it about 50% faster (15 pages per minute black, 8 color), gets more pages from the same 502 ink bottles, and adds a maintenance box you can replace yourself. That last change matters: older EcoTanks eventually stop with an “ink pad at end of service life” error that needs a service visit. RTINGS also found its black-and-white and color output more accurate than the ET-2850’s.

Running costs

This is the reason to buy it. The ET-2980 uses Epson 502 bottles: 127 ml of black and 70 ml each of cyan, magenta and yellow. At Epson’s October 2026 prices, with its rated yields for this model:

Page	Math	Cost per page
Black	$24.99 ÷ 8,500 pages	about 0.29¢
Color	(3 × $16.99) ÷ 6,500 pages + black	about 1.08¢

PCMag measured slightly lower figures in 2025 (0.26¢ and 0.95¢) before Epson raised its bottle prices. Either way, that’s roughly 30 to 50 times cheaper per page than a typical cartridge inkjet. The bottles in the box are rated for up to 6,600 black and 5,500 color pages, which Epson says is about three years of printing at 125 pages a month.

Print quality

The labs agree it’s good, and disagree about how good. RTINGS called its black-and-white documents superbly sharp and praised its wide color range and detailed photos. PCMag rated text good enough for most uses but below the best inkjets, with ragged edges on very small type, and found graphics saturated with smooth gradients. Consumer Reports rated text and glossy photos very good.

Photos are fine for the fridge and the family album, not for a gallery: PCMag found them slightly dark with oversaturated reds. With only four inks, it can’t match a dedicated photo printer. If photos are a priority, look at the six-ink Epson ET-8500 in our home printer guide or our best photo printers guide.

Scanning and copying

The flatbed scanner is fine for a page or two, and Consumer Reports rated scan quality very good. RTINGS was less impressed, calling it mediocre. There’s no document feeder, so multi-page documents mean lifting the lid for every page.

Design and setup

It’s compact for an ink-tank printer, about 15 by 14 inches and 7 inches tall, with a 100-sheet rear paper feed and a small 1.44-inch color screen. It prints two-sided automatically and connects over Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct or USB, with AirPrint and Mopria for phones. There’s no Ethernet port.

Filling the tanks is easy because each bottle is keyed to its own tank, so you can’t put magenta into the yellow tank. Setup then walks you through a semi-automatic alignment. Consumer Reports found Wi-Fi setup more tedious than usual, and the tiny screen doesn’t help.

Speed

PCMag found it snappy to get the first page out. Over longer jobs it’s average: RTINGS calls its printing speed mediocre, and Epson’s own ET-3950 finished PCMag’s full Word document about 10 seconds faster. For home use, that’s rarely noticeable.

Reliability

Like every inkjet, the ET-2980 can clog if it sits unused for long stretches, and its printhead isn’t user-replaceable. Epson’s advice is to clean the head only when print quality drops and to top up each tank at least once a year. The simplest habit is to print something every week or two. If you go months without printing, a laser like the Brother HL-L2460DW is a better fit.

On the plus side, it needs no account or subscription, Epson’s smartphone app and cloud printing are optional, and the bottles have no chips, so there’s no cartridge lock-out to worry about. Epson’s warranty doesn’t cover damage caused by third-party ink, so we’d stick with Epson’s bottles: at these prices, the savings from compatible ink are small.

How it compares

• Epson EcoTank ET-3950: the same ink with a 30-sheet document feeder that scans both sides, a 250-sheet cassette and Ethernet. Worth the extra if you can find it in stock.
• Epson EcoTank ET-1910: cheaper and print-only, without automatic two-sided printing.
• Brother HL-L2460DW: a black-only laser that never clogs, but costs about 4¢ a page. See ink tank or laser.

Should you buy it?

Yes, for most homes. The ET-2980 makes printing cheap enough that you stop rationing pages, and it does documents, homework and casual photos well. Print regularly to keep it healthy, and choose the ET-3950 instead if you need a document feeder.