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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.
The ink-jet cartridges measure their print out volume based on the number of droplets deposited. A +/- 5% change in ink droplet diameter represents a +/- 15% change in volume. When dealing with really small feature sizes, variable temperatures, and variable viscosities, it is really tough to control droplet diameter exactly. The result is that the ink-cartridge manufacturers need to overfill their cartridges to guarantee that some customer in some corner case doesn't experience a rash of cartridges that run out early.
This tactic is kind of like the hand-soap people that sell a 1 L container of soap with a hand-pump that only works for the first 950 mL. If we can see the soap in the container, we get annoyed because of the 50 mL of waste. However, the ink-cartridge people hide the amount of ink left in the "empty" cartridge, so we don't notice the waste.
Of course, when you are dealing with professional cartridges, and print-outs that can be worth big money, the printer cartridge manufacturers have to guarantee that the ink doesn't run out. The cheapest way to do this is to add a little bit of ink.
In the case of consumer cartridges, HP, Lexmark, and Epson would be deeply upset if a bunch of the customers complained about "empty" cartridges that still said they had 5% capacity left. To prevent complaints, add a little bit of ink ...
Adding a little ink makes everyone happy, until someone actually looks at what is left in the "empty" cartridges, and measures it with sufficiently accurate equipment to realize how much "extra" ink is left.
In the case of consumer cartridges, HP, Lexmark, and Epson would be deeply upset if a bunch of the customers complained about "empty" cartridges that still said they had 5% capacity left. To prevent complaints, add a little bit of ink ...
There are two obvious solutions to that problem:
1: Stop lying to your customer by claiming to be measuring the remaining ink in a cartridge when you're not.
2: Actually measure the ink in the cartridge and report that amount to the user. I understand that from the printer manufacturers point of view, the ink is cheap, but from the customers point of view, ink is hideously expensive. Given the customers cost of ink, they would be better served by an accurate mechanism to measure the remaining ink, rather than stupid tricks like this to claim a feature that the product really doesn't have. There have to be dozens of different ways to measure ink remaining, some of which are bound to be dirt cheap and far more accurate than the current method of "guessing"
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I had an Oki laser printer where you pop the top and there is a row of troughs you just pour toner into. No messy cartridges to deal with, no cassette refills. Just get bottles and empty them into the troughs every 20,000 pages and the thing's golden for another 20k pages. The thing knows how many pages it's printed but it doesn't have a service limit (that I ever hit, and I printed hundreds of thousands of pages on the thing). All of that and I only had to change out the corona wire twice. That slid out the side and the new one slid in its place, took all of four seconds.
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a) Do it outside or next to your kitchen's fume vent.
b) By the time the print heads are damaged you'll have saved enough money through cheaper ink that you can buy a new printer.
However, some (most?) cartridges track how much ink passes through them, not how much ink they contain. Refilling one of those won't let you reuse it as it'll still believe it's passed enough ink. You need to hack those.
No one can give you a 'safe' source for ink if you don't tell people what printer you're using. Printer ink isn't interchangeable between all printers.
IMHO that's a pathetic argument. Why the hell are you estimating ink usage when it's possible to directly measure remaining ink? The old Canon printers used transparent ink cartridges. A sensor shone a light through the ink reservoir (right side in the pic), and when the light was unimpeded, it knew the cartridge was empty. Every Canon cartridge I replaced was in fact completely empty (except for a little ink in the sponge material directly above the outlet.
This is a simple problem, made unnecessarily complex solely as a means to make customers buy more ink.
Generally speaking that is a different brand. Epson generally will give a warning, but has driver options to continue printing with the warning, or refuse to.
Refusing to print is very useful where you have office idiots who will become unhappy if their print job actually fails. Requiring the printer to refuse when it hits the safety margin means that they'll contact IT or maintenance, the cartridges will get refilled, and the print job can continue.
Also, the printer is a wide format pro inkjet designed for short run photo quality reproduction. The emphasis is on getting perfect prints every time. My experience with professional short-run printing has been that on printers without ink level controls, the color starts to fail when the ink is low, but often before it actually hits 0. If you're under 10%, you need to be examining every single page for the beginning of errors. This particular printer is designed to provide higher confidence than that. The ink cost is still substantially lower than competitors.
Also, the cartridges are sold based on volume in ml, but when they talk about cost and when you're calculating print cost it is normally done on the basis of cost per page in a real test. If the cartridges still have ink in them when they're "empty," you're still getting the exact same cost-per-page that you researched before buying the thing. It would be great if that ink could be recycled, sure. But nobody is "losing money." If the delivery had less waste, they'd still be selling the ink at the same cost-per-page that they are now.
Cartridge prices would have to go up, not down, if you added that sort of sensor.
It isn't priced by the milliliter, even though it is labelled that way; the prices for professional inks are based on the cost-per-page ratings. The physical ink costs very very little to manufacture. You're paying for use of the technology more than anything else. This is just the user misunderstanding how the prices are arrived at and which metrics are important to them.
This is absolutely not an over-charging scenario, 100% of the area of legit complaint here is environmental waste.
And as far as accurate measurement goes, Epson even makes systems that use bottles, and systems that have refillable cartridges. They are the best major company at offering that stuff, but people rarely buy it. Sure, the CISS (bottle) stuff saves you on ink, but you spend more money up front for the delivery system. Even professional users like the people in the story often don't bother, they just buy disposable cartridges and misunderstand the product. And then whine that it doesn't have the benefits of CISS; instead of buying CISS systems that are available for their existing 9900 model printers!
I mean I can understand that maybe the electronics in cheapass printers aren't the best, and that also maybe they act a bit shady to try and pad margins. However on pro gear, that shouldn't be the case. When you buy a big expensive printer, and its expensive ink, it should use it all.
To HP's credit, their poster printers seem to do that. We have a T920 at work and it drains the cartridges down to nothing. I've cut them open after it was done and it really did get it all. Also, you can swap a cartridge mid print and so long as you are reasonably fast (say less than a minute) it doesn't harm the print quality so you can run them totally dry.
Likewise with regards to 20% that is the level they start to signal low ink, they don't even complain until it is that low.
As far as I am concerned, that is how high end printers should work. The device was expensive as hell, the ink and paper is expensive too, it should get every dollar out of it that can be had.
My Epson was bought on the premise of having a separate ink cart per colour, so I expected this to improve ink economy. However, it turns out that Epson have done their best to avoid any such economy improvements:
1. It flatly refuses to print at all if any of the carts are empty - a number of times I've been unable to print important black & white documents because one of the colour carts is empty and I didn't have a replacement to hand.
2. Whenever you change a single one of the carts, it reprimes all of them, wasting a lot of ink from them all.
3. When the display tells you one of the carts is empty, it won't let you look at the stats to see which other carts are almost empty (so you could swap them at the same time). This invariably leads to me changing one colour, watching it reprime all of the carts (see (2) above) and immediately tell me that another has run out because of the priming, so then I have to change that one and let it reprime all of them *again*.
Also, I find that blocked heads are perpetually a problem, leading to me having to waste lots of ink repeatedly running the cleaning cycle. Next time I buy a printer it won't be an inkjet.
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Had the same happen in the early 00s. Epson Stylus Color 600 I believe, or was it the replacement (C52) bought because the heads in the first one were clogged.
Mom rushed out to buy a 42 euro black cartridge because we had one page of "very important" print to do, but the printer actually wouldn't print because of lack of yellow. In retrospect I wished we had sued Epson for fraud. Some high-level executives should be jailed for this, though getting a refund would have been fine.