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Epson Is Trying To Kill the Printer Ink Cartridge
An anonymous reader writes: Inkjet printer cartridges have been the bane of many small businesses and home offices for decades. It's interesting, then, that Epson is trying something new: next month, they're launching a new line of printers that come with small tanks of ink, instead of cartridges. The tanks will be refilled using bottles of ink. They're reversing the economics, here: the printer itself will be more expensive, but the refills will be much cheaper. Early reports claim you'll be spending a tenth as much on ink as you were before, but we'll see how that shakes out. The Bloomberg article makes a good point: it's never been easier to not print things. The printer industry needs to innovate if it wants us to keep churning out printed documents, and this may be the first big step.
Have they solved all the nozzle cleaning problems, etc. as well? Why would I want an inkjet?
I can buy a color laser for less money that will also print thousands of pages between refills. Plus it "just works", no messing around, ever.
No sig today...
Has solved it already a few years ago with Epson Claria inks. They are still costly (based on the cartridge-pricing-model), but the whole point of that product is that it doesn't block the heads if you don't print anything for a while.
I have an Epson PX720WD myself (got it cheap out of a dealer going of of business), and use it *very* rarely. There may be several months between sheets, and nearly a year between color printings. I've replaced the cartridges once. And never gotten a blocked printing head.
I'm in the same boat as you with my current ink jet. I needed to copy something yesterday. It took 5 minutes of cleaning/priming the cartridge before it printed the one page. I think I've printed less than a dozen pages of your average color office document and all 3 of my non-black cartridges are empty. My last Canon when it bit the dust I disassembled to see if there was anything salvageable for a 3d printer. In the bottom I found a quite large thick absorbent pad that is used to soak up ink when it's primed. It was completely saturated with about a kabillion dollars worth of ink.
Yup. And the entire device stops working if one of the cartridges is empty. You want to scan a page? Replace the yellow cartridge first.
Except with just refill bottles instead of cartridges it means that it is vastly easier to sell off brand ink, no pesky DMCA and such on the cartridges, so you are not really locked in.
You haven’t seen the bottles, have you? They come with pentalobe shaped tips that only fit the pentalobe shaped hole on the printer’s ink reservoir.
Same problem here, same problem for my parents. I owned a HP colour inkjet printer years ago, cartridges always dried up and I ended up using over half the ink via "cleaning mode" just to make the damn thing work again when I wanted to print a page again after a few weeks. Even worse for my parents, they bought an inkjet printer, I helped set it up, it worked, a couple days later it already had missing lines in the printouts due to clogged-up print heads. Of course my father was pissed, "every time I just want to print out one or two pages, I have to clean the damn printer for five minutes before it works again!"
So I bought a €100 black and white laser printer for my parents, they are happy with it and the 3000 pages toner cartridge will last them forever. I myself had already switched to laser printers years earlier, I bought a colour one last year (previous model to this: http://accessories.us.dell.com... ). Cost me €250, the toner lasts a long time, print quality is very good even for pictures (of course not suitable if you REALLY want to print out glossy photographs on high quality photo paper) and a third party set of toner (all colours) costs about €30.
Worried about viruses on a USB stick at a photo kiosk? What is this, the 00's? Upload it to the website and its printed by the time you get to the store to pick it up.
This is easily solved. Print simple business graphics and previews of photographs on you color laser. For high quality photo prints, just let a professional print shop print them for about 10 cents a pop. This is a lot cheaper and way better quality than anything you can do yourself at home with even the best of inkjets.
Musicians. I keep an android tablet on my piano too, but a lot of the time it's more convenient to print out the sheet music that I'm currently using and lay the pages side by side on the stand instead of working with a smaller tablet screen. Tablet is great for trying stuff out and whatnot but it's nice to print the sheets out for longer term study.
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