Epson: “We waste ink.”
Take this with a grain of salt because the issue(s) we’ve had with our Epson printer lately were, more or less, the straw on the camels back. During this same time we were helping a friend with his iPhone.
Eliza and I have an Epson Stylus CX4800. We don’t print very often and when we do it is generally in black and white. Eliza wanted to print out some invitations to an event she’s putting together for a friend and when she went to print the printer replied with the error ‘out of ink’. How the printer ran out of ink may forever remain a mystery since we don’t print that often - but my best guess is that the cartridges dried out.
Eliza picked up a black ink cartridge because she and I both thought that’d be sufficient. We only wanted to print black text. She came home, plugged it in, fired the document back at the printer and: ‘out of ink’. I tried just about everything to force the Epson to think it could print. I removed all but the black cartridge, I told the printer to only print black, and so on and so on.
The crux of the matter is stated, rather simply, by Epson on their site as this: “To keep the print head clear, the printer uses a small amount of ink from all the cartridges whenever it prints and to keep the print head primed. Even if you select Black Only, some color ink is still being used.”
I’m sure there are very good reasons for this but surely there has to be a better way to keep the head clear without wasting ink that costs over $60 every time we need to buy new ink.
In my mind this is a waste of ink.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Agreed. What a piece of crap!
October 11th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
One problem is that there are tiny little “pipes” in the printhead that the ink flows through. The ink flows from the cartridge, through the printhead, and out onto the paper.
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.
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October 11th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Myron: You do it again! Completely pwn me on my own blog. Yeah, I’m sure this is a headache that many printer manufacturers are spending gobs of money to research and solve. One thing I noticed that other printers do, however, is allow for people to remove the color cartridges and leave the black ink in - this way they can still print black text. It’d be nice if Epson did too.
October 11th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
I do agree, I always thought it was pretty silly that you need to have a color cartridge to print B/W. Although, it’s been my experience that almost all printers require that you have both the black and color cartridges to print B/W.
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.)
October 11th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
The problem here is not that you aren’t printing regularly, the problem is that you are using epson. While the print quality on epsons are great, they pressurize their ink and the heads are not removable. (Or they weren’t when i used to clean printers). This creates problems because a) if something goes wrong and you mistakenly remove the cartridge then you are sunk. The cartridge is voided.
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.
February 1st, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Or you could by an Hp which uses the individual 6 ink system, when the machine runs the maintenance set up cleaning etc Any ink that is used in this process is put back into the cartridge. e.g the C5180, if you look at the cartridge it has a hole at the bottom and at the top.
Its a shame Hp doesn’t publishes this info as they would make a fortune on these machines, ok you still have a built in print head but at least the ink is recirculated.
February 26th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Didnt get the FREE $100 rebate and got stuck with Epson 4600? which every 3rd print job forces me to replace a $15 stupid color (cyan, then magenta, then yellow ad nauseum) in order to print a BLACK AND WHITE print job.
Fantastic job in making tons of money off customers Epson….Crappy job of providing a printer
that will ever work.
Want my money back!!!!!
June 22nd, 2008 at 4:28 pm
holy CRAP!!!!!!!!!!!!! I Want My money back as well!!!!!!!!!!! I will throw this EPSON CX7450 in the TRASH before I buy another color ink cartridge!!
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:58 pm
yeah,… i’m having the same problem here now,…
i need 2 print a business proposal, worth $1000, and i should give it 2 my client in the morning,… and i’m stuck here, and wonderin’ why the printer can’t workin’… #$#()!@*$(@#*$@()#*$ stupid epson,.. want my money back also,.. i feel like i’ve been fooled
November 4th, 2008 at 6:43 am
Years ago, when I bought a printer, it used black ink only. Then they upgraded to black plus color but you had a choice. You could use one without the other. To say that you need color in order to use black and white and vice versa is just repetition of a good lie designed to make people feel that thats just the way technology works. We have been duped. Someone at Epson and other companies came up with the way to force us to keep using all the ink and buying more ink - when it was never necessary before. Printer Ink currently costs more than gasoline. I wish I had saved my antiquated printers. They were not designed to rip me off - like the printers on the market today. If I can find one printer that still uses the old technology, I’m throwing all these high faluting printers directly into the trash.