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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.
"No recourse", except for using this program, distributed freely by Epson on their website, to reset the ink pad counter?
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Storesupport/InkPadsForm.jsp
My last HP printer refused to scan if the ink was low.
I used "last" there as meaning not only "previous" but also "final".
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.
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.