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.

Comments

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[Aighearach]

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.

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[FireFury03]

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.