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.

Comments

dry ink

[Spazmania]

I ditched inkjet printers because the ink dries out before the next time I want to print something. Toner cartridges don't seem to have that problem.

Can Epson overcome that problem?

Re:dry ink

[Zarhan]

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.

Re:dry ink

[Mal-2]

Canon solved this problem ages ago. They use an ink that is melted during the print phase, so it never dries out. They're great for people who print quite infrequently.

Re:dry ink

[Golden_Rider]

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.

Re:dry ink

[jrumney]

Back in the early days of inkjet printing, Epson had their print heads on the printer, and the cartridges only held ink, making the cartridges cheaper than the competition. They also had separate cartridges for each color, while the competition (HP, Lexmark, Canon) combined the color cartridges into a single three cell cartidge and in some cases even included black in a four cell cartridge so you had to replace all at once. I was a light user, and had the same printer for about 3 years, going through two sets of cartridges in that time (maybe one or two more black cartridges). After three years, the printer was still in good condition and printing well, and I gave it to a friend because I was moving overseas. No inkjet printer I have had since has matched up to it. Unused ink clogging up print heads was an artificial problem caused by additives in the ink, it was never a fundamental issue with the technology.

Re:Canon already does that?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This used to be the case in the past...

[Joce640k]

I'd just be happy with larger ink cartridges. It is sad how few milli-liters most cartridges have.

Also: Individual colors, and a head declogging routine that works on a single cartridge at a time instead of draining the perfectly good colors as well.

The final straw for me was when one color was blocked, so I did a couple of cleans to sort it out and that drained another color so I had to put in a new cartridge (luckily I had separate colors), run the cleaning again, by which time another color was flashing as empty and I had to change that as well. During this time my brand new black ink cartridge went down by about 25%. All in all that page cost me about $20 to print.

I went out next day and bought a color laser. I've had it about 10 years and only bought one new set of cartridges. It's always worked first time - switch on and print. I'd rather stab my own eyeballs with forks than own another inkjet.

Re:Don't believe the hype

[marciot]

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.

Re:Obligatory TheOatmeal comic

[innocent_white_lamb]

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.