Printing industry analysts estimate that a typical home user spends roughly $120 a year on ink.

That’s not a typo. Over five years, your “budget” $60 traditional inkjet printer has quietly eaten $600 in consumables.

This is the razor-and-blades model perfected. Printer manufacturers sell hardware at or even below cost, then make their margins on proprietary cartridges that run dry after a few hundred pages. It’s been this way for decades, and for decades, most people just accepted it.

But a newer category of printer has been chipping away at that model: the refillable-ink-tank printer. Instead of snapping in a sealed cartridge every few weeks, you pour ink from a bottle into a built-in reservoir. One bottle can last for thousands of pages. And the economics change fast.

What is a refillable ink tank printer?

A printer with refillable ink tanks replaces the traditional cartridge slot with large, built-in reservoirs that you fill from bottles.…