HP Smart Tank 7005

Bye bye, overpriced cartridges, hello bottled ink

- Ian Osborne

Cartridge-free printing really is the future for inkjets. Instead of expensive, unenvironmental cartridges, ink is supplied in bottles, and squirted directly into the printer’s tanks. It’s easy to do, makes no mess and while printer ink will never be cheap, it’s more affordable than buying it in cartridges.

This particular cartridge-free printer has four built-in tanks, for pigment-based black ink, which is ideal for printing text, and three colour tanks for dye-based ink. It comes supplied with 70ml of each colour and 270ml of black. Given that even XL cartridges typically contain around 15ml of ink, this is a generous supply.