Can someone sum up the advantages and disadvantages of cartos vs. clearos? I have always used clearos.
This is a matter of personal opinion, as there are advocates for both types of delivery devices:
I always preferred cartomizers (in cartotanks) over clearomizers. I can sum up the rationale as follows. A clearomizer has only a tiny wick of silica string. The surface area is rather small compared to the polyfill of a cartomizer, which can lead to dry/burnt hits. Also, silica has never been known to be a good flavor carrier.
The cartomizer's wick is the polyfill, which the entire inside of the carto is filled. That's a significantly larger surface area, so not as likely to get dry/burnt hits while vaping.
Clearos are designed to be easy & fast to fill and use, but there's the muted flavor issue that is the gamechanger for me. A carto takes a little longer to fill (drip, drip, drip), but to me its worth the time and trouble. If used in a cartotank, the carto only needs to be filled during initial setup. You don't have to add more liquid to the carto when refilling the cartotank. So after the initial setup for a cartotank, the time requirements and ease of use are similar for both clearos and cartotanks.
Now, the exception to this rule of thumb are the new vertical coil replacement heads that recently came out for the Aspire Mini Nautilus (and others). These use a new wick of porous ceramic material; which sort of makes these clearotanks a hybrid between a clearo and a cartotank. A sort of "best of both worlds".