Epson's 'Empty' Professional-Grade Cartridges Can Have 20 Per Cent of Their Ink Remaining 268
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.
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I'd write something witty but I ra
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I'd write something witty but I ra
This. My car's "empty" on the gas gauge means there's 20% left in the tank so that there's some wiggle room from the notice to the literal empty of the tank.
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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.
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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.
The article is unclear on that... it says it gives a notice but then also says that notice is that it must change... whether that notice to change prevents it from operating is not really stated. On consumer grade printers, the notice pops up but you just ignore it until things start printing poorly.
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My last HP printer refused to scan if the ink was low.
I used "last" there as meaning not only "previous" but also "final".
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My epson not only will keep printing past the warning, there is even a driver setting for black; if it refuses to print without color (which makes the blacks richer) or if it just switches to black-only black when the color cartridges are low. (you do still have to leave the empty color cartridges installed for it to work on black-only)
If the color is low, I do have to press "continue" every time I send a print job and it warns me.
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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.
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Yes, Epson and Canon printers beat the current crop of Fiorinized HP inkjets. Too bad the horrible software support makes then unviable for most users. Last week I tried to install a new Canon all-in-one at a customer site, and discovered that the WiFi connection menus assume that your router has a WPS button. If it doesn't, you can't connect to your router with SSID and password and have to plug in as USB. And unlike on HPs, there's no option to temporarily connect USB and set up wireless from the computer.
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I had one of those. An incredible ripoff considering I rarely printed anything but did have to scan documents related to a house sale only to be told nope, gotta go buy MOAR INKZ!
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HP had a 'fix' for our printer to align it with HP's profit goals though. HP added two air bladders to new cartridges so that the ink volume was halved in our larger cartridge, doubling the cost per page. Thanks HP!
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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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Any way you calculate it, a waste factor of 20% is a bit high for any print cartridge.
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You are not paying for the Ink. You are paying what you can bare for each sheet of paper. Adding 20% of extra liquid to the cartridge, so you get perfect prints each time, cost less than a penny for the manufacturer.
Just looking at the ink (after subtracting the cost of an empty cartridge) it is one of the most expensive liquids you can buy: http://www.buzzfeed.com/higgypop/top-10-most-expensive-liquids-on-earth-6qcr
And it is particularly unacceptable on high end (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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My A3+ inkjet has 16ml of ink when full, so 120ml of ink is around 8 cartridges worth. So seems very excessive.
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This smells like your load of carp under the Arizona sun.
For most users, the better option is to buy a budget monochrome laser like the HP 1102W: hundred dollar printer, twenty-dollar toner cartridges that last me a year and never dry out for infrequent printers. For the occasional photograph, I order from Snapfish for less than I used to pay for inkjet cartridges. Plus, online photo services give a range of finish options, like large sizes and gicleé, that I could never do myself.
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Mine does if I'm on at a stop light, on a hill, on a busy expressway.
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uhhh. It's a Chevy Colorado (pickup truck). By "stop running", it quits working and I have to push a truck in busy traffic to the side of the road. Which turned out to be impossible since I was pointed up hill.
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I guess i should check it out some day, then.
Anyone got a source for 'safe' black & color i (Score:2)
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?
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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
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Thanks - good advice.
> Printer ink isn't interchangeable between all printers.
Oh OK... didn't know that. Mine is a Lexmark S415
Re:Anyone got a source for 'safe' black & colo (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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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?
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They aren't exactly sure how it happens, but they categorically deny hiring the hitmen.
Re: Anyone got a source for 'safe' black & col (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
Re:Anyone got a source for 'safe' black & colo (Score:5, Funny)
"Anyone got a source for 'safe' black & color inks?"
Safe generic ink is a pigment of the imagination.
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I wait until it quits printing (Score:2)
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I reported you to HP.
Re:I wait until it quits printing (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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What's sad is that I can actually see this happening, when someone points out that simulating failure at the preprogrammed time will cause people to buy ink sooner instead of still using it.
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I did that with the cartridges that came with my wife's printer (HP color laser printer). We bought the replacements as soon as the warning came up, but actually replaced them only when it started going bad, which was several months later.
Then the replacement cartridge (black, original HP) started printing with stripes while the printer said it still has 60% left!!!
I went out and bought a replacement (non-original) cartridge.
How's that for extreme YMMV sports?
Shachar
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You disallow color printing, but provide color printers?
They still manufacture mono lasers you know.
Class-Action time? (Score:3)
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 $$!!
Re:Class-Action time? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Agreed that a laser is a better choice. I understand that an inkjet needs to clean periodically, but that's no excuse for refusing to print in black and white just because the color carts are empty or missing.
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inkjet printers are built for photos while laser/LED printers excel at text and business graphics.
I keep hearing that, but my personal experience is almost reverse. When I'm printing photos, I always do that on a color laser printer, as the quality is higher.
After some investigation, I came to the conclusion that it's the paper. Normal paper has fibers that cause the ink dots to squash. A laser printer, that presses the ink on the paper, does not cause the ink to smudge.
So I'm faced with either getting really good pictures for cheap (per page), or pay lots more for both more expensive ink AND more expen
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Color laser printers are fast, reliable and give excellent print quality in both crispness and color production.
Why are they not in common use? Because they are bloody expensive!
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They are not as dirt cheap as inkjets, that's true, but the printer we bought is a very far cry from "bloddy expensive". We bought a low end HP color laser jet. It is painfully slow to start up and to print stuff (I think it's rated at 4 pages a minute, and you can actually see it mulling the PCL commands it is receiving and turning it into a page), but for our purposes (my wife is getting a teacher's certificate) this is more than enough. B&W printing is actually faster, unsurprisingly.
Shachar
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My hope is that there will come a day when home users no longer have a reason to print in color. I base this possibility upon a typical home user, my mother.
Mother does not believe in data. Mother maintains draws full of photo albums, even though they could be scanned, because computer images are not 'real.' Mother did not stop printing off digital photos to go into these albums until some years after we got our first decent digital camera. Mother still refuses to allow the disposal of the albums that are o
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It's expensive to line the hall's walls with digital photo frames.
Will it become less so in the future? Maybe. Not in the near future. Also, putting a nail in the wall (and then covering the hole if you want to move it later) is much simpler than making sure there is an electricity outlet nearby. Will remote charging fix that? Maybe, but that is an even more distant future.
Shachar
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Is that so? In my medical practice, 99% of our prints are B&W. Prescriptions, referral letters, test requests and so forth. 3 years ago we switched from Samsung ML-4050 laser printers to Epson WF-7520 inkjets in 3 consultation rooms, simply because we could not source the Samsungs any more and needed printers same day.
Guess what - prints much faster (because most of our prints are 1-2 pages only, hence "finished first page" is what counts, and after using up the cartridges that came with the printers we
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The brother cost me 60 bucks, the m177 cost me 144 bucks. I couldn't be happier.
Pursuit of happiness is easier for some
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The last HP I bought went through a bunch of ink and didn't even print good photos. Always left ugly streaks and the firmware was flaky. Switched to a Lexmark laser printer and couldn't be happier about it. Ink is still overpriced but it lasts longer and works much better.
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That just means the ink is drying up in the cartridge. These things do not have an unlimited shelf life. I've opened some up where the ink was nearly completely solidified inside others just needed the sensor cleaned. Not everything is a conspiracy - I wouldn't be surprised if the article's issue is related to the type of package used inside the cartridge. It looks like it might arc on the underside as it looses mass causing the ink to pool at either end... they could probably take the cartridge out, sh
Epson printers and ink pads (Score:3, Informative)
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 [consumerist.com] - 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.
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maybe they're free cuz they all have sopping full ink pads?
Re:Epson printers and ink pads (Score:5, Informative)
"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
Re:Epson printers and ink pads (Score:4, Informative)
not quite right, there is a utility (by Epson) that is normally only available to certified Epson repair agents. All it does is reset the WIP (Waste Ink Pad) counter. It is also able to reset the ink level counter on SOME cartridges. If the printer doesn't work after running that, you have larger issues than a saturated sponge.
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Epson printers are free on Craigslist.
It's called "schadenfreude".
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It is a real shame. They used to make really good printers. I guess the demons of greed got to them also, just as with so many others these days.
This is to be expected, and affects many printers (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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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% o
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What CISS printers would you recommend?
Re:This is to be expected, and affects many printe (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [photo.net]. 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.
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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.
It's All A Scam... (Score:2)
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-fill
An environmental design (Score:2)
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.
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5000 copies?? That's about the toner capacity in one of those portable Panasonic lasers. I know, I had one.
My Brother HL1030, on the other hand, is on its fifth toner refill (and second fuser) in the time I've had it, now well over 100,000 pages printed over the last seven years. Do the numbers, that's a: nearly due its sixth refill, only about 500 pages shy of that I think, maybe more, b: over 20,000 pages per cartridge. That's a light duty SOHO printer, not a shop machine.
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My Brother HL1030, on the other hand, is on its fifth toner refill (and second fuser) in the time I've had it, now well over 100,000 pages printed over the last seven years.
That's 40 pages per day, 7 days a week, for 7 years. I hope what you're printing is used to save orphans or something, because you personally have killed 10 trees. Future generations are thankful.
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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.
I got laser printer (Score:2)
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 no
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bucket fill laser toner for the win (Score:5, Interesting)
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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I have a Brother HL1030 now, it's a B&W but pretty much the same thing - bottle refill the cartridge, reset the counter using the standard consumer control panel, resume printing. I think I do need a new fusing roller though, it's marking my pages along one edge.
Continuous ink system (Score:2)
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Exactly. Find a cheap printer and a cheap continuous ink sytem. Eventually the ink jams up the head but who cares. You saved plenty of money in ink to buy a new printer.
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Yep, CISS is awesome. 700ml of ink per colour and the bottles are what, £40 for all FOUR? Hell, even converting the Epson printers for CISS still only costs £70 for the ink - still better than 20ml carts at £25 a set!
Which is why you use CIS (Score:2)
If you're not using a Continuous Ink System then I've very little patience for these complaints.
It's not expensive (Score:2)
The ink is cheap, it just has huge markup.
Annoying, but ink isn't sold by the ml (Score:2)
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.
Epson Professional Printer? (Score:2)
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You have to be careful not to put all your uranium bricks in one box.
Epson is actually offering an alternative now (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Selection bias in unbrage? (Score:2)
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 [wikipedia.org].
Now, if he cracks open a fresh cartridge, and there's 700mL exactly, then there's an is
Professional is not Hobbyist (Score:2)
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 dra
Make 'empty' cartridges just like new again! (Score:2)
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
What does it change? (Score:2)
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.
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Have you looked at the cost per page of the new lasers? The same companies that brought us hideously priced ink for inkjets have created even more expensive toner for laser printers.
I don't purchase a new printer until I have computed the cost per page of the toner/ink. Often, the heavier "business" class devices have a much lower cost/page on the toner cartridges, and the savings often pays for itself in very short times (on the order of 3 to 4 sets of cartridge changes.) Also, colour lasers are more e
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I don't think you're going to print 44" fine art reproductions in 11 colors with a 12 cent print. I can probably find 12 cent 3x5s, but 4x6 the standard rate is about 25 cents. An 8.5x11 color laser is going to run 55 cents. You're going to pay multiple dollars per print for what they're doing in the story, just for the same size, and at fairly low quality.
The part you're missing is that "consumer inkjets" and "professional inkjets" are very different. Consumer inkjets are more expensive than cheap laser; p
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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 complete
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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.
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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 he
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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.
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You can get CISS systems for Epson printers, including the 9900 in the story
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this is the executive management team of Epson America:
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/S... [epson.com]
They all look trustworthy.
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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
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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.
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Does it print animated gifs?
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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.
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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.