The Wall Street Journal:
We don’t love paying through the nose for the ink, and the arrangement means that at the first sign of printer trouble, many of us just dump the thing and buy a new one.
Epson’s new move is a sly one. Rather than compete on price, the printer maker is dropping the cartridge issue entirely.
When you buy an EcoTank printer — for instance, the ET-2550 — you fill up its four-chambered reservoir with ink from plastic containers included with the printer. There’s a satisfying feeling of dumping all of that ink into the tubs. You then let the printer prime itself and your ink worries are over.Fast forward two very print-productive years. You and your family have churned out more than 35 black-and-white and 60 color pages every week. Finally, you need more ink. Epson will sell you a whole set of replacement canisters for $52. That same amount of Epson ink, in XL cartridges, would cost more than 10 times as much.
I’m a big fan of my Epson R2000 photo printer but I dread using it knowing how much I’m going to be spending on ink. I don’t know if higher upfront costs will be a game changer but it’s good to see Epson (and undoubtedly other manufacturers) stepping up to change the economics of printing.
I’ve killed at least two inkjets by simply not using them often enough. Even with after-market cartridges, they were simply too expensive to use and too temperamental to worry over. If Epson can remove one of those weak spots, I might consider getting another such device.
If this is true (gotta wonder, Wall Street Journal) then I might just get an Epson printer now. And a really good one!
I’m old enough to remember that the printer manufacturers started this mess in their race to the bottom on initial pricing. It’ll be interesting to see whether they can shift people’s mindset to paying more up front. Especially since we’ve all had a decade of low-cost, low-reliability printers now. I might consider buying one of these… if it came with a 5-year warranty.
Yeah, it’s really sad to see going back to tanks marketed as some sort of innovation, when it is the old technology purposefully killed only because of greed.
I gave up on using inkjet printers a few years ago. About 15 years ago or so when inkjet printers first became “photo-quality”, I loved being able to do my own prints at home. However, now with drug stores, Costco, mail-in outfits etc. providing convenient and cheap options, I would NEVER go back to using an inkjet. As they pushed the inkjet nozzles smaller and smaller, I found that every single time I used my inkjet, I needed to unclog the jets. Not only was this time consuming, but it wasted huge amounts of ink. Often, it would get halfway through the unclogging process, and then would stop and say I first needed to replace a newly emptied ink cartridge. Sometimes this would repeat before I was able to successfully print.
A few years ago, I switched to a color laserjet. I have been SO much happier with it. The ink is still expensive, and I can’t create glossy photos with it, but it always just works. And … if I use high quality paper, it is also good enough for making prints for my daughters to take to school for various projects that they are working on, or printing out their reports.
When photo printers first came out I was so excited about being able to print photos myself. Now, not so much. I’ll just stick to a monochrome laser printer and if I need pictures printed I can get them done about a block away pretty cheaply and without the hassles involved with inkjets.
Supposedly, these printers have better constructed heads that don’t clog so easily. The fact that printing is so much cheaper ink-wise might mean printing more often and reducing the chance to clog? Not sure.
I’m intrigued, but none of the new printers are really top-quality photo printers. I’ll wait for one of those to show up and give one a try.
This is how our big HP poster printers work. This is also a $20K printer :-/
My only concern is Epson’s not-so-great history on keeping print heads running, particularly in dry climates like min in AZ. I’ve had two simply cease functioning, and no amount of head cleaning would fix ’em.
Never again. The liberation I felt upon dumping my ink jet was right up there with paying off my student loans. If I listed my top 5 worst technology purchases, ink jet printers might occupy multiple spots.
Yup. I don’t even bother with color printing anymore. A $90 laser satisfies all my B&W printing, and when I need it I’ll pay per page to print color somewhere else.
If it helps, yes it true. Actually they started making them a while back. I just bought one and it arrived today. Looks good so far.
The main problem I have with inkjet printer is the ink dries up before I use it more than 5 times. And once it dries up the print head is always clogged up.
Few years ago, I bought a laser printer for like $39, still working great today.
I’m perfectly happy with my Epson Artisan 830. A few years old and still humming along quite nicely with cheap generic ink. I clean the heads occasionally, but – knock on wood – this is the longest I’ve gone on any printer. I use dollar store glossy paper for photos and seriously can’t tell the difference between them and the Epson ink/HP-or-other-“high quality”-paper combination.
I stopped using Epson after too many printers and too many clogged heads. Tossing out nearly full cartridges because the Epson printer thought they were empty. Of course it thought they were empty, it thought I had actually cleaned the heads dozens of times when nothing was actually coming out. No thanks.
I was given, given!, a second hand Hewlett Packard multi function printer about 7 or 8 years ago now. Still works great. Imagine, when you change the cartridge, you change the print head. What a novel idea.
Epson never cared and I don’t care if they do now. Never again.
Epson led the way too, let’s not forget.
I wanted double-sided printing to save paper, so I went with the $250 printer. 😉
Seriously.
HP has a new color laserjet that does double-sided printing and is very small, for $300. sold.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TVACKEE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Isn’t that how the better large-format printers have worked for a long time? I can’t imagine any manufacturer getting much of a professional customer base at that level by requiring busy service bureaus or art departments to swap out cartridges every couple of days.
Cheers to you for having done both.
yeh. We were also very surprised how long the original tanks lasted…we did a LOT of posters and it was still a year and a half before we ran out.
Look at the cost of replacing the toner. Bet it’s more than $300.
As it should be.
The yield on each color is about 2,300. 2,800 for black.
That’s inline with most laserjet printers.
Next time! The one I have right now can’t even AirPrint. But plugged into an old router at least I have printer sharing for the Macs.
I actually worked for Kyocera about 20+ years ago when we introduced a new line of network laser printers under the name Ecosys (Eco-logically and Eco-nomical sytem…I told you it was terrible). The idea was that the drum lasted 300K pages and all you replaced was the toner at 1/3 the price of HP cartridges for only a slightly higher purchase price. But the idea never caught on and HP continued to rake in profits. Now the cost of color may tip the scales a bit more on the concept, but I’m highly dubious of any signifiant impact for Epson.