Fantastic job in making tons of money off customers Epson….Crappy job of providing a printer
that will ever work.

Want my money back!!!!!

For the casual printer I would get an HP. Even if you don’t use it that often the heads are on the cartridge and you can pop them out and clean them with some cleaner and be back in business.

Printers do use a TON of ink when cleaning (relatively speaking) If there is a sponge on the inside reach back and touch it with your finger. It is almost always soaking wet with ink.

Beleive it or not, most inkjet printers actually use a little bit of the colored ink even when they are printing B/W. They mix it together with the black ink to make a “better” black. That’s why you need a color cartridge even if you are only printing black.

In theory, you could still print without the color, your black just wouldn’t be as good as it could be. In practice, I doubt most printer makers want to make this possible. It reduces their total revenue because they would sell fewer cartridges.

(As you probably already know, most inkjet printers are sold at a loss just to get people to buy cartridges.)

Over time, the ink that is stuck in those pipes will dry out and get hard. Then your print head is plugged. Regular cleanings prevent this. If you leave an inkjet printer turned off, the heads will clog eventually because the ink in the pipes will dry up.

There is a mutually-exclusive goal here. You want your ink to dry quickly so your pages don’t smear (especially if you use plain paper in your inkjet). But you don’t want it to dry super-quickly, or your print head will always be plugged.

The other problem is that dust and other random particles are floating through the air. They have a natural tendancy to “stick” to things that are “wet”. Leave a glass of water out on a table for a few days. A film of gunk will build up on the top of the water. Same thing happens to ink passages in your printer.

If you leave a printer on, it will periodically do a cleaning cycle to keep the ink passages clear. A cleaning cycle usually means it will squirt a tiny amount of ink through the heads to flush out the passages. There is usually a “sponge” inside the printer that absorbs the cleaning ink.

Of course, it is in the printer mfr’s best interest for the printer to keep cleaning itself. (1) It keeps the print quality good, which makes them look good, (2) It burns through cartridges faster, which makes them more $$$. Epson is generally considered to be one of the worst offenders in this area. However, this is more of a “reputation” thing. I don’t have any hard numbers to back it up.

How do you solve this problem?

1. Make ink that never dries out, unless it touches paper. I’m not sure how this would work. Maybe special chemicals in the paper. But that would probably make the paper expensive. It would also force people to buy special paper. They wouldn’t be able to put the $0.49 pack of copier paper in their printer.

2. Come up with a way for the print head to clean itself without using ink. I’m envisioning a secondary resivor or “washer fluid” that circulates through the print head periodically, with a fancy valve system to disconnect from the print cartridge when the cleaning cycle runs. I’m sure this wouldn’t be cheap. This wouldn’t be a $49 printer anymore.

3. Use a non-liquid ink. These already exist. There are a few options: Laser printers (powdered toner), Dye Sublimation Printers (dry dye on a ribbon), or Colored Wax Printers (melted crayons). All of the above work reasonably well, but they are more expensive. Economies of scale are not on their side.
-