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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.
I'd write something witty but I ra
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Ideally, I'd refill generic ink but...
I am not sure about
(a) the ink vapors being carcinogenic
(b) ink damaging the print head.
Anyone got a source for 'safe' black & color inks?
I've got an HP, it annoyed the hell ouf me to replace ink cartridges that obviously had ink left. Now I wait until that color starts streaking, then replace the cartridge.
This kind of thing looks like it would be good for a law firm to put together a case, and file a Class-Action suit. I am angered by printers where we *NEVER* print in color (printing logs at work) but after so many months, the printer WILL NOT WORK until you feed it a NEW color ink cartridge (or ALL THREE)!
Yes, even with the defaults set to "Black Only", changing the black ink is not enough. The printer simply WILL NOT WORK until all 4 cartridges are replaced. The old color ones feel much heavier than the old black one, so it is quite obvious what's going on, here.
FOLLOW THE $$!!
Willie...
At our business, I have ran HP b&w cartridges almost 100% (time wise) beyond "empty" on override.
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.
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.
Inkjets are a scam. A total scam. They always have been. Everyone knows this. Buy a laser.
I've had exclusively laser printers for the past 15 years. Will never buy an ink jet again. Lasers are better in every way. You dont need to print colour.
"But mah photos."
Get them printed at a photo place for 12 cents each.
It will do a better job, and it will be cheaper.
"But we need color graphs for the presentation!"
Get a color laser.
Ink, and the price of ink has ALWAYS been the money maker for "printer manufacturers" - ink companies. Laser is a better deal, but there is still a ton of powder left when the *computer chip" says you have reached 5000 copies. It's all a scam, both ink and toner.
These companies realized that building and marketing well engineered printers was not paying the CEO's 50 million a year contract (and bonuses), and so they had to rethink the sales equation. I have a relationship with a third party cartrage re-filler who refills my laser cartridges and charges me for the powder they put in and a small service fee. They tell me that they sometimes can reprogram the cartage chip, but more often just replace it with a doppelganger.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I buy Brother ink cartridges from eBay. Can't say anything about damaging the print head, but one of my previous printers died from a phantom paper jam, and I forgot what it's bought used same make and model replacement died from, but my current one has wireless networking while the previous ones only had wired. I had to put this one in storage for awhile, and when I got it out, I had to replace the cartridges, and run the cleaning and diagnostic routine a few times for it to clear the ink in the lines that had went bad and printed black on the test patterns. But it finally started working like normal. They were all multifunction all in ones.
I don't have much need for color, and not much need for printing at all. Typically I print about 10 pages a month. With an inkjet printer I would have a cartridge last one or two months, so 10-20 pages, then the cartridge would be dry. Dried out dry. This was on two different printers, an HP (horrid) and a Cannon.
I bought a Brother laser printer and have been on the same toner cartridge for over a year. OK, the refills are expensive, nearly $100. The ink cartridges were almost $60, because it would not let one just replace the BLACK... I still see it as having saved the cost of the printer over buying ink every month!
When I need color, which is for presentations, I have them professionally printed. I have yet to spend $60 on a stack of color printouts for a single presentation.
Naturally your mileage may vary much more than mine has.
Laugh, it's good for you!
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"
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
would feed from a large, refillable reservoir or at least have user refillable cartridges. A system DESIGNED to make refilling easy would itself be easy engineering. There are no engineering problems here, only a wish to make money off of ink.
That said, if ink was rationally priced then printers would be a little more expensive. Their cost is subsidized by the ink.
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.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Heh...I have a lexmark printer that I purchased about 12-14 YEARS ago....I'm still on the original toner cartridge that came with it
You can get a printer with a continuous ink system, or mod the printer to handle that. The ink costs will be a lot less, too.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
You're not kidding, here's a page for the Epson 9900, mentioned in the summary. That thing can print large pages (and you can get $1000 off the purchase price if you buy right now!)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Printer companies have been abusing customers for long enough over ink that it's time for anti-trust regulation for them.
I had a printer from a company that sounds like "Mullet Smacker" such that when either the color or black-and-white cartridge was "past the expiration date", you had to answer a notice on the front printer panel to continue printing for each job, even if you didn't use that cartridge for a given job. In other words, it nags you to buy. And you couldn't run it without one or the other: you had to install both cartridges.
Sometimes the "free" market is just plain stupid/evil. If you don't play nice, you get your ass regulated. If you don't like "socialism", don't be a dick.
Table-ized A.I.
pro grade inkjets don't use cartridges, they use bottles and pipes to the print heads; this is known as CISS, or Continuous Ink Supply System,.and a 500ml bottle of a given colour will last a MONTH of 24/7 printing. Page counters aren't there for service alerts, simple visual inspection of the bottles will tell you EXACTLY how much ink is left.
source: had a Brother inkjet with built in CISS: you never had to go near the heads, the bottles were mounted via a front panel and ink was piped from there to the heads in a flexible ribbon tube.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The manufacturer assures you that putting any new ink into one of their cartridges is likely to kill you, your children, your parents, probably a few of your neighbours, every single puppy in town, and your printer.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
That's mostly true of small laser printer cartridges with an integrated developer. In those cartridges the developer roller grabs toner directly from the toner chamber. If the toner isn't evenly distributed, some parts of the roller get more or less toner than others, causing streaks.
Higher grade lasers have a separate developer and drum unit. The toner cartridge is just a hopper; gravity pulls the toner into a trough with an auger that leads to the developer assembly. Unless the toner somehow gets completely jammed inside the cartridge (unlikely) shaking the cartridge is completely unnecessary and won't accomplish anything.
Large laser printers and copiers often forego cartridges entirely and simply have permanently attached, refillable toner hoppers. Good luck shaking that.
(Side note: As a rule of thumb, the larger the printer, the cheaper / longer-lasting the consumables, and if you print more than a few pages a day the consumables will eventually dwarf the cost of the printer. For the past decade at my house I've had a $1000 office printer and a $100 personal printer, and they've both seen similar use. Guess which one has had the lowest TCO?)
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
this is the executive management team of Epson America:
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/S...
They all look trustworthy.
lucm, indeed.
I don't care (much) if there is 120mL left when the cartridge is "used up." I care that I'm not getting the use of every mL that is listed on the box.
If the box says "700mL" I expect 700mL PLUS whatever reserve will be left when either the print starts to face or the printer refuses to print, whichever comes first.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you're not using a Continuous Ink System then I've very little patience for these complaints.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The manufacturer assures you that putting any new ink into one of their cartridges is likely to kill you, your children, your parents, probably a few of your neighbours, every single puppy in town, and your printer.
Where do I sign up?
Usually the trick with refilling cartridges is not the ink, it's replacing the dmca-protected chips that enforce the manufacturer's monopoly on their cartridge market. Don't buy printers that use them.
I have a 20 year old laser printer (it still has a centronics connector) that I use to print shipping labels. Haven't printed anything in color in years.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
pro grade inkjets don't use cartridges, they use bottles and pipes to the print heads
That isn't always true, because this printer in question does have cartridges. I think that a printer that handles 44" wide paper and have 11 separate colour cartridges (including three levels of black) is hardly a consumer device. The cartridges come in three sizes: 150 ml, 350 ml or 700 ml, the latter having a larger capacity than what you call a pro grade inkjet.
Does it print animated gifs?
lucm, indeed.
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.
They aren't exactly sure how it happens, but they categorically deny hiring the hitmen.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
"Anyone got a source for 'safe' black & color inks?"
Safe generic ink is a pigment of the imagination.
They didn't get "caught" at anything. LOL
This is just a consumer-reports type of complaint, from customers that are overall very happy and who admit that the product is vital for their work.
Ink is priced based on the cost-per-page numbers, which are based on real print runs with standardized images. There is no scam here at all; the cost-per-page tests ended with ink still physically inside the cartridges, too.
There will be no apology, though there might be some attempts to explain the product to these guys.
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.
The ink is cheap, it just has huge markup.
You can get CISS systems for Epson printers, including the 9900 in the story
Costco refills ink cartridges for about $10.
There is another option. Call it an estimate and let it continue printing even when it says "ink estimate: low", and, medium, and high respectively.
When you buy a cartridge, it's just that, a cartridge. They don't tell you how many milliliters are in it and you don't get charged by the milliliter so how much ink is left in the cartridge when it's "done" is irrelevant. There's a cost per print and that's the important metric. Obviously there's some reason why they don't drain them completely dry and it doesn't really matter since you're paying by the cartridge not by the milliliter.
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've a Brother color laser/led printer, had it set into toner save mode and rarely printed anything in color. After a few hundred pages, it claimed that the black was finished and the color toner at 50%. Toner saver my ass; apparently the cartridges have some kind of mechanical counter and when the mechanism turns at the power-on self test, it counts, even if zero toner is used. If you use the printer mostly for one-page jobs, that counts. I was able to reset the counter, but it was a pain.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Is that like as Lego brand nuclear reactor?
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
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.
Didn't I read some time ago that printer ink was more valuable than gold? Any inkjet cartridge holds 10-20 mL of ink compared to a ketchup packet at Burger King (27mL). How much is uranium going for on the Iranian market?
Indeed. Whenever they need a little bit more revenue, they increase the margin at which the printer will lie to its owner and claim the cartridge is empty.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have a five-year-old laser printer. It started complaining about an empty cartridge four months ago. Still going though.
I think it isn't 'empty' so much as 'expired.' Nothing a shake can't fix.
I think a big annoyance to users of professional laser printers is the Bucket of Doom that must be very carefully removed from time to time, which gives them a chance to see all that toner that has not ended up on the page where it belongs.
I hate to ask this, but has anyone measured how much ink was in the cartridge to start with?
Measuring how much is left can give you a distorted answer, since it's possible that Epson is overfilling the cartridge to ensure you 700mL worth out of it, with some leftover to account for evaporation and filling the ink lines if the printer goes completely empty, etc.
This could very well just be a classic case of Selection bias.
Now, if he cracks open a fresh cartridge, and there's 700mL exactly, then there's an issue. But, if there's more (which also would make sense, since there's more leftover in the larger cartridge than in the smaller one.), then we have a relative non-issue here.
Reeses
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.
Thanks - good advice.
> Printer ink isn't interchangeable between all printers.
Oh OK... didn't know that. Mine is a Lexmark S415
Every inkjet printer I've ever had measures the ink ink the cartridge. The neatest way of doing this that I've seen is via a prisim on the bottom of the cartridge that works with a light sensor. There's no excuse for calculating the remaining ink in this day of automation. Measurement is trivial.
I very rarely print anything, and when i do 99% of it is just monochrome, although i do scan quite a lot... I had an inkjet all in one and it dried out due to lack of use... I also found that they never updated the closed source drivers, so its usable from 32bit xp, macos ppc or linux which has open source drivers for it.
These days i bought an old laserjet 4200 from ebay, it came with a full toner, has ethernet and supports postscript. It won't dry out due to lack of use, and the toner it has will probably outlast my use of the printer. I paid something like $50 for it.
Being postscript i know it will work with anything and i won't need to screw around with drivers.
For scanning i did much the same, bought a networked scanner which just talks SMTP and sends the output via email.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
It's a 'professional' printer. If you leave the office the evening and start the print job to print out the final 10 giant drawings of the skyscraper to begin building next morning, this prevents that all the electrical/gas/water lines are missing from the last 3 drawings, because one color went dry, without anybody missing them until after the tenants (try to) move in.
Some time ago when professionals still printed on plotters, they installed new rapidographs on the plotter every evening to plot out the drawings for the exact same reason.
You can go bankrupt when lines are missing, who cares about a couple of hundred bucks, 'professionals' they are not.
I switches to a cheap colour laser a few years ago and it's just so much easier to deal with. No more cleaning before printing, hvite stripes in printout, etc
The only problem is the HP driver.
For some reason the driver constantly pings the printer ip, even when connected to a different network. And the ICMP payload seems to be pretty random.
Triggered the IDS at work, so now I need to remove the driver after each use. But I don't really print that much at home from my company laptop so it's not a big issue.
But they really could spend a little more time on cleaning up their drivers.
No matter the brand, if it is an inkjet, it is going to behave pretty much the same way. It is an engineering constraint more than anything else. They could design the machines to use every drop in every tank every time, but the cost of that would be such that you wouldn't buy the machine, you'd buy a far cheaper competitor machine. Even with those [older] canon carts, when empty, there is still about 20% left in the spongy part near the output hole.
For most brands you can override the OOI error by pressing and holding the stop button for ~10 seconds. Better not to do that.
When you run a bubblejet out of ink, you stand the risk of damaging the print head. The print head is comprised of thousands of nozzles. Each nozzle has a tiny heating element. To deliver ink, the heating element gets hot, vaporizes a tiny amount of ink behind it which in turn pushes liquid ink out the nozzle. With no ink behind the heating element, best case is the heating element will eventually overheat and may burn out that nozzle; That's one streak through your prints. A single streak ruins every print.
That's fine for a two-cart system where you are replacing the print head when you replace the cart. But for the higher-end machines, the print head represents most of the cost of the printer. Ruin it and you've ruined the machine.
Older technology used piezoelectric crystals to push the ink. They didn't have the burn out problem but they were limited as to resolution.
But yea, there's no doubt they charge way, way to much for their ink carts. Don't like it? Buy a laser jet.
What CISS printers would you recommend?
so find a printer with a low cost per page such as officejet pro (we have a ~ 5-6 year old 8000) and just stick with genuine cartridges if you need quality prints.
You're hilarious. HP phases out their printer cartridges every few years (at least for the Photosmart series) so you have no choice but to replace your printer when you can no longer buy cartridges for it. We don't buy HP any more for that very reason. Any HP reps get shown the door.
I have had an Epson Stylus C86 for years. First, I buy ink cartridges at PrintPal for a fraction of the price of Epson carts, and I've never had a problem with them. Second, when the printer tells me a cart is empty, I pop it out, gently shake it to make sure it's not really empty, and if not, I just hit it with my handy-dandy cartridge zapper that I picked up for $5.99 on eBay. Voila! The cartridge appears full to the printer. Seriously, it's a little plastic gizmo with contacts that match up with those on the cart, and it resets the counter to zero in a matter of a second or two. I wonder how much money that little thing has saved me over the years...
Cartridges are rated for a number of "standard" printed pages. Why should I care if there is ink left in the cartridge as long as it meets its requirements. The price for ink cartridges is totally artificial anyway, so it is not like the extra ink makes a difference.
If you don't like the idea of a black box cartridges, then don't by a printer with black box cartridges, or you may complain about the unavailability of such printers. But don't complain about what happens inside the black box.
$1000 off is 20% off ... maybe it's in response to the ink scandal?
;)
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
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:
1: Stop lying to your customer by claiming to be measuring the remaining ink in a cartridge when you're not.
Indeed, this could be simple as changing the label from "Ink Levels" to "Usable Ink Levels" (or something like that). This should be a reminder to programmers to be accurate about what they tell users.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
air bubbles.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
"pro grade inkjets don't use cartridges"
Spoken like someone that's never worked in the printer repair industry.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"2. Bash against desk and shake"
That's a good way to get toner all over your cat. Trust me, she hates that.
You want to remove the cartridge and rock it slowly back and forth a few times. You will know to do that when a vertical light 'gutter' starts to show up through your printed pages.
I'm confused as to why we're surprised by the this. Nobody is offended when the a CD of doesn't have enough content to fill the medium. The cost of a printer ink cartridge is far greater than the material costs.
The printer manufacturer has a monopoly on the cartridge. We need to fix that, not get our panties in a bunch about a particular way they exploit this advantage.
-Dave
seriously, use Lasers...
Inkjet is an unreliable technology, especially when used very occasionally.
aaaaaaa
By volume :
1 liter of ink in small-volume-abusive-consumer-price : 630 Euro
1 liter of gold (at room temperature) : 600 000 Euro
By weight :
1 kg of ink (roughly assuming a density of 1) : 630 Euro
1 kg of gold : 31 000 Euro
These are ballpark figures.
But yes, for HP or epson investors, redesigning a new cartridge form factor to make more money is worth gold.
aaaaaaa
I highly recommend doing a complete analysis of your needs, instead of fishing for broad recommendations.
Obviously, Epson has the lowest ink cost of major companies with consistent and vibrant inks. Some people care more about exact color replication than cost-per-page or color vibrancy.
Further, some people don't even need name-brand inks, and those people will not benefit from all the print head technology in the higher end inkjets. You're not going to get consistent minimum droplet size with a third-party ink; they are just regular inks, and don't have the special electrical properties that the name-brand inks do.
Generally speaking, Ricoh is the most popular professional CISS vendor. As expected, they're more expensive than Epson, but offer more accurate registered colors. So if you're printing the same image with multiple technologies on different media and want the colors to match most closely, then that works well. So advertising shops usually choose something like that, because their customers care about the exact shade of their logo. Fine art shops, like in the story, mostly don't care about registered colors, they want to reproduce the image as vividly as they can on the media they're using; if a print on another media type wouldn't have quite the same pop, they don't want to make the better media look worse in order to match registered colors. So even if you throw price out the window, you have to know what you need before you determine which type is good for you.
At the consumer level, I think Epson is the only one offering brand-name CISS systems. US customers might get stuck ordering from Europe or Asia, though. If you don't want name-brand ink, just buy a cheap printer and an aftermarket CISS system.
It's in the best interests of the manufacturer to squeeze the customer as hard as it can.
Normally competition would prevent that, but I think there's a gentleman's agreement of sorts not to blow everyone up by releasing something that would break the racket for everybody.
The manufacturer assures you that putting any new ink into one of their cartridges is likely to kill you, your children, your parents, probably a few of your neighbours, every single puppy in town, and your printer.
Are you SURE about the puppies?
Because I have tried so many other things to get rid of those smelly nasty dogs...
If the article isn't missing anything it sounds like a very good basis for a massive, and very unpleasant, class-action lawsuit. If they were putting a little extra ink in the cartridges and only using the labeled amount it would be one thing, but if they are putting in the labeled amount and then using only a portion of that at a bare minimum it is false advertisement, and it could very well be fraud.
spoken like someone who makes vacuous assumptions that are often wrong, as in this case.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Not just Epson but all of them do this.
There has been at least one class-action against Epson in the past for this.
Add of the # of people that don't question when teh printer says "change me", multiply the $$$ they rake in from ink - the cost of settling a suit and it's a no-brainer to conduct business this way.
I wasn't comparing name-brand ink to generic ink, I was comparing name-brand to name-brand.
If you use a CISS system, Epson ink is still cheaper than the other name brands. Generic ink is cheaper, sure. It doesn't have special electrical properties matched to the print head, though, and on high end fine art prints like in the story, that matters a lot. Also, the performance won't be as predictable on some media types.
And you can't compare 700ml carts to bottles. That is apples and oranges. Compare the cart to the cart and the bottle to the bottle.
And why do you think the price is based on ml? The price is based on the cost-per-page metric. If it used 10% more of the ink in the cart, the price of the cart would go up to meet the exact same cost-per-page metric. There would be no savings for the customer. Anybody who thinks inkjet ink is priced on cost+markup should buy a stack of "for dummies" books and try to make it up to "basic computer literacy" over the next few years. Because they're living in a cave.
Epson print heads are in the printer, not in the cartridge like an HP. When no ink is in the cart, one would inject air into the printhead. Paradixically, aur can block the head and render the printer unusable. Epson may not be intentionally tipping off users; they just have a bad design. Ironically it came from trying to save money on cartsby not selling a new printhead with each cart.
Where I live, printer ink for ink jets works out at well over $10,000 / litre for the genuine article from the manufacturer. This is more valuable than almost any other home-use material I can think of. It's been around for decades, but the economies of scale that see prices drop for mature products don't seem to apply. I buy color laser printers now, but they also seem to run out of toner far too quickly for what I pay for them. For toner cartridges can cost me $400-$500. Yet one of the colours always seems to die rapidly.
Only boring people are ever bored.
All of this is so much shit (not your post, but the industry). I had to work with the marketing people on a logo, and the marketing people took 2 months, and more meetings than I care to remember to work out the exact color and process and such. Then, they place the order. What we get back doesn't match. The marketing team ordered the wrong thing. Turns out none of the people on the marketing team noticed. I had to point out that it wasn't what I remember from the endless meetings before someone looked twice and noticed it was wrong. Months to agree on a standard, then they don't even notice when it doesn't match. Might as well have a blind monkey make color choices and proof printings.
Learn to love Alaska
If we could replace this pathetic printer with something else, we'd be glad to. Unfortunately, it connects to a special piece of equipment that can only "talk to" a specific, limited set of USB printers. I am thinking about writing to the device manufacturer, asking them to add more printer support to the unit. I hope they respond in the affirmative!
As for the color ink drying out... we wouldn't care, as we *NEVER* use it in this printer. The irksome thing is that the printer simply stops working, altogether, when the unused/useless color ink runs out... it does NOT function as "Black Only" even when that option is set in the Printer Preferences.
BTW, the unit in question is used in a broadcast radio station, for the "Emergency Alert System", so it's not exactly something we can replace at will.
Willie...