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

(intentionally blank)

[fisted]

I'd write something witty but I ra

Re:(intentionally blank)

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the printer refuses to print when the cartridge is 'empty'. It'd be like your car refusing to start or automatically turning off as soon as it hit empty no matter what. You'd then have to disconnect the tank, throw away that 20% of fuel, and buy a new gas tank from the manufacturer and only from the manufacturer.

Re: (intentionally blank)

[spongman]

My last HP printer refused to scan if the ink was low.

I used "last" there as meaning not only "previous" but also "final".

Re:(intentionally blank)

[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.

Re: (intentionally blank)

[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.

Re: (intentionally blank)

[Aereus]

Exactly. For how infrequently the average person needs to print something in color, there is little cost-benefit to keeping your own color printer at home. It's far more cost effective to get a consumer laser printer these days and just do your handful of color prints at a local print shop. I really recommend the Brother 2270DW. It does wireless printing and full duplex and can be bought for around $100USD. The best part is the toner cartridges last for thousands of pages and can be had for the same price as one inkjet cartridge. If you absolutely must have color printing, even color laserjets these days can be had for $250-300.

Re:I wait until it quits printing

[Jeremi]

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.

Re:Class-Action time?

[pushing-robot]

Ink dries. If your printer didn't flush the color ink periodically it would likely damage the print head.

I agree that ink is absurdly overpriced and printers designed for profit over efficiency. However, you're mostly suffering from not using the right tool for the job—inkjet printers are built for photos while laser/LED printers excel at text and business graphics.

A cheap monochrome laser would run circles around your printers in speed, crispness, and reliability, with far lower cost per page and no ink to dry out.

Re:Epson printers and ink pads

[Anonymous Coward]

"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