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Epson's 'Empty' Professional-Grade Cartridges Can Have 20 Per Cent of Their Ink Remaining
sandbagger writes: Printer ink is expensive, so it's important that when a printer tells you a cartridge is running dry, the cartridge is actually running dry. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. The folks over at Bellevue Fine Art in Seattle recently decided to find out exactly how much ink their high-end Epson 9900 printer wastes. A professional grade 700ml cartridge will have 120-150ml remaining when "empty," and a 350ml cartidge will have 60-80ml remaining when "empty." For this studio, the difference amounts to hundreds of dollars worth of ink every month.
Epson printers come with an "ink pad", which is a sort of sponge that sops up excess ink from clearing the print heads and such.
When the ink pads are filled with ink, the printer firmware simply refuses to print - there's nothing you can do, no way to fix it or reset it. Your only recourse is to get another printer.
The printer doesn't *sense* the amount of ink in the pads, it simply calculates the amount of ink it *thinks* is in the pad, and the firmware will lock you out if it thinks it's too much.
And this can happen in the middle of a print job: the system gives you no warning or notice. Half the pages you need for your presentation tomorrow are sitting in the output tray, and the printer is junk. There is no recourse.
I've personally disassembled over a dozen Epson printers, the ink pads are never even 10% full when this happens. It's a complete scam.
Epson printers are free on Craigslist.
My last HP printer refused to scan if the ink was low.
I used "last" there as meaning not only "previous" but also "final".
My epson not only will keep printing past the warning, there is even a driver setting for black; if it refuses to print without color (which makes the blacks richer) or if it just switches to black-only black when the color cartridges are low. (you do still have to leave the empty color cartridges installed for it to work on black-only)
If the color is low, I do have to press "continue" every time I send a print job and it warns me.
If you're turning on your inkjet, printing one page, and then shutting it off, you're running a print head cleaning cycle (which uses up ink) every single page. If you were to actually print 100 pages in a single run, you'd only use a tiny bit of ink.
And ink dries out. If you use inkjet, expect to replace cartridges, yeah, about every six months. Also, the "cheapest" ink cartridges are the most expensive on a per-page basis. If you combine buying the smallest carts with very short run printing, you won't get very many pages per cart and your cost-per-page will be very high. You might really be better served with a cheap laser printer, where light printing you might not use up the factory-installed toner for a number of years.
At the professional level, the high capacity (700ml) cartridges that Epson sells have the lowest cost-per-page in the industry. That is just fact. I hate wasted ink because it is bad for the environment, but the idea that the company with the cheapest ink is ripping people off with over-priced ink is just silly. Yes, tiny quantities are expensive. They price the small cartridge consumer ink at the same market prices as everybody else, and they compete for price on the business cartridges that are the ones in the story.
As for Windows, Just Say No.
True, but if the printer was more accurate on calculating the "empty" state, you would be getting a lower cost per job. Print costs on wide format printers like the 9900 are measured in printed square feet, not pages. Average use on the 9900 is between 1.2-1.5 ml/sqft so the ~120 ml remaining in the cartridge could print another 100 sqft of output.
Any way you calculate it, a waste factor of 20% is a bit high for any print cartridge.
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We love to hate the printer manufacturers for the usury prices of their cartridges - after we bought their printer at a price that we could guess did not cover the production cost. It's the razor-and-razor blades model - they pretend to sell us a printer, and we pretend to pay for it. To Epson's credit, they are now actually offering an alternative (and to my knowledge they are the first major player in the consumer printer space to do so). Their new EcoTank models use a continuous ink system very similar to the after-market CIS you can buy for many Epson printers - just without the mess of ink on you hands and clothes, without having to carefully route tiny ink hoses through the printer enclosure, without changing DRM chips etc. Yes, the EcoTank printers are more expensive than their brethren without CIS (maybe 50% ?), but the refill bottles seem to be in the same price range as the after-market stuff. Next time I'm in the market I will probably give it a try.
We had an HP deskkjet 500 at work that pre-dated the razor blade business model for inkjets. It was well made, had a large ink tank that didn't dry up and didn't have a 'screw you' chip.
HP had a 'fix' for our printer to align it with HP's profit goals though. HP added two air bladders to new cartridges so that the ink volume was halved in our larger cartridge, doubling the cost per page. Thanks HP!
Posting as an Anonymous Coward for reasons:
Huh, thanks for the link. I wasn't aware that the 9900's were that cheap. I've just started servicing these Epson printers as part of the range of equipment I work on. And for the record, my hourly rate is higher that the cost of a few household inkjet printers. And no, I don't work for Epson. And yes, I've been at this for a few decades.
Your observations, both of you, were spot on. My customers don't quibble about my hourly rate. They do care about their printers' down time. And, they're cheap to run: compare the BHPhoto price of the package of 14 8x10 sheets (for $50 printers) and that of the 16inx100ft roll (roughly 200 8x10s) for the 9900: $22 vs. $62.
I went through almost all of the comments for this article and made mental notes...let's see how many I can remember:
Yes, Epson and Canon printers beat the current crop of Fiorinized HP inkjets. Too bad the horrible software support makes then unviable for most users. Last week I tried to install a new Canon all-in-one at a customer site, and discovered that the WiFi connection menus assume that your router has a WPS button. If it doesn't, you can't connect to your router with SSID and password and have to plug in as USB. And unlike on HPs, there's no option to temporarily connect USB and set up wireless from the computer.
This smells like your load of carp under the Arizona sun.
For most users, the better option is to buy a budget monochrome laser like the HP 1102W: hundred dollar printer, twenty-dollar toner cartridges that last me a year and never dry out for infrequent printers. For the occasional photograph, I order from Snapfish for less than I used to pay for inkjet cartridges. Plus, online photo services give a range of finish options, like large sizes and gicleé, that I could never do myself.