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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!
I reported you to HP.
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...
HP has a solution for that -- the next update of the printer driver will apply simulated color-streaks at the image-rendering stage. Thus the out-of-ink indicator discrepancy will go away.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
Epson stock price has dropped about 40% in the last year, and the company has paid dividends in the range of $0.20 - $0.60 per share over the last few years.
Roughly this means that in order to use his Epson income to buy an 8 ball of coke to be snorted on the ass of a hooker, a shareholder needed in 2015 to have an Epson position that took a $800 dive in the last 12 month, and which is unlikely to turn black anytime soon. That amount excludes the price of the hooker, the coat check and the valet service.
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.
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.
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.
You disallow color printing, but provide color printers?
They still manufacture mono lasers you know.
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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: