Getting ink for Epson Ecotank printers

... if you live in the wrong place

One of the most irritating aspects of living in Japan (apart from the slippers, anyway) is the way in which Japanese manufacturers produce two completely different ranges of equipment (printers, in this case, of course): one for Japan, one for everywhere else in the world.

I have an Epson L-310 Ecotank printer: this is brilliant in use, because it reduces the ink cost to around one-tenth of the usual rate for printers with cartridges. It means that the ink comes in bottles, and you have to pour the ink carefully into the ink tanks.

However, this is not a "Japan model", so it is not easy to find which ink to buy for it. It turns out there are two sorts: pigment-based ink and dye-based ink. The difference is that dye basically soaks into the paper, colouring it, whereas pigment has solid particles which form a layer on the paper. Use the wrong sort of ink, and it may damage your printer. Epson warn of this, but of course it is not in their nature to do anything as helpful as to explain which ink labels mean which sort of ink.

The answer (not guaranteed)

The ink in the Japan market is labelled as "Shoes" or "Scissors". Yeah, really. Here's a key:

TypeMysteryJapaneseCode (Japan)Code (not-Japan)
Dye 染料Scissorsハサミ (hasami)HSMT664
Pigment 顔料Shoesクツ (kutsu)KSUT774

So the simple answer is: the L-310 uses dye-based ink, so you need ハサミ (HSM) in Japan, and T664 in not-Japan.

I wrote this page hoping that next time I was stuck I would be able to find it on the Internet somewhere. Here are a few links to corroborating evidence...

Keywords: Epson, Ecotank, pigment, dye, pigment-based, dye-based, L310, HSM, KSU, ハサミ, クツ, 顔料, 染料