June 21, 2007
Is your InkJet printer ripping you off?
There's an interesting thread over at Slashdot, discussing the shady practices of inkjet manufacturers:
InkJet Printers Lying, Or Just Wrong?
akkarin writes in about a study reported at Ars Technica on how accurate ink-jet printers are when they report that cartridges are empty. Not very, it turns out. Epson came out on top of the study (and Ars rightly questions how objective it was, given that Epson paid for it), but even they waste 20% of the ink if users take the printers' word for when to get a new cartridge. On average, the printers in the study wasted more than half the ink that users bought.
Elizabeth uses an inkjet printer, and it always seems to be running out of ink . . . yet we don't print that much (certainly less than the advertised number of pages) between needing being told we need new ink cartridges.
Posted by Nicholas at June 21, 2007 10:53 AM
Well, I know my inkjet printer is ripping me off.
I have an Epson and it's a couple of years old.
I specifically bought it because it had separate
ink tanks for each colour. Remember when everyone
made a big deal about how only one cartridge for
all the colours meant you were wasting ink when the
first colour ran out? This was supposed to solve
that problem. The only problem is that my Epson
C80 insists that all the cartridges use ink at the
same rate and are all empty at the same time,
regardless of what ink is actually used. How can
I be sure of this? I had problems with some
colour cartridges, so I got into the habit of
specifying a "black only" print when I wanted
output and, sure enough, when the black ink ran
out, the printer insisted all the coloured inks
had run out two -- even though I could feel that
the cartridges were full.
So I did the only reasonable think -- I bought a
laser printer.
