But not as frightening as the cost of the Epson inks!
It seems a lot to fork out when you've just bought the printer but the
cost of the Epson inks soon adds up. Apparently the Epson inks work out
at about £1000 per litre while the Lyson inks are only about £70.
Incidentally I made a note of the quantity of each different ink I used
(sad isn't it) but it might be of use to you when ordering - Photo Black
(9), Light Black (11), Cyan (4), Light cyan (15), Magenta (7), Light
Magenta (22), Yellow (13).
Emyr
Very good point. At about $10 US each, your ink costs are: (drum roll
please) $810 US, more than the cost of the printer.
The real game being played here is in the light inks, especially the m
and c, and to a lesser extent, the black. Those c and m alone cost you
about $370 US. Now, in fairness, you would have needed to buy some C
and M to replace them, perhaps 25% (or less) as many, or about $90
worth, for a savings of $280.
There is "some" justification for a light black ink, especially when
making B&W prints. But the light color load c and m are, IMHO, a scam
of mass proportions. Not only is the printer profile designed to burn
through them, but with today's dot size, they are totally unnecessary to
produce photographic quality images.
Simply put, the light color load inks could easily be made up for by
using a small dot, or series of dots, and allowing the paper to show
through. That is how all offset printing is done, and has been forever.
With 2 picolitre or smaller dots, no one can see the difference at
viewing distance, and in fact, you need a loupe to see it even close up.
I use NO 6 or seven color printers, and I have never had anyone imply
my images are not photographic quality in nature. In fact, I had a six
color rendition done of some work that I had done in 4 color, and the
four color actually looked better to me.
These ink companies are selling you water, some glycol and maybe some
resin for massive amounts of money. The dyes or pigments are the most
expensive component in inks. They have to be color accurate and have
fade resistance qualities. If the extra colors were really that
important to the end result, the printers could be designed with
chambers to mix those light color loaded inks, using a cheap "medium"
fluid held in storage, and a mixture made for the heavy color load
cartridges. After all these inkjets use incredibly precise measuring
methods to print with... it would be easy to make a two chambered
"cartridge" which would automatically replenish a mixture of the carrier
fluid and dye or pigment from the main color load cartridge. But that
would cut heavily into ink sales.
Also, in terms of dyes, the light dye load inks are more vulnerable to
fading because the surface dye on the paper helps to protect the dye
underneath from fading. The darker the dye on top, the less it fades.
A smaller dot of full dye load is more stable from light than a larger
dot of very dilute dye.
With the improved size of the heads (number of nozzles) and variable dot
technology, and the faster computers and processors within the printers,
there is really no need for the c and m low color load inks. We are
being scammed.
Further, these waste additional ink if you do not refill (and even if
you do). As noted in the numbers, the low color load inks run out
first. In unified cartridges, this means either tossing the cartridge
with leftover ink in the other chambers, or refilling and going through
extra purge cycles which wastes inks and build up the protection numbers
toward a waste ink pad replacement.
With the separate cartridges, things are not much better, since each
time you run out of any color ALL the cartridges are purged during the
replacement of the one cartridge, dumping six or seven times the amount
of ink down the drain as needed. This is NO accident. Epson designed
this "feature" into the machine. The same thing happens with a change
of Photo to Matte or vice versa in the black ink.
In fact, with the professional 7600 and 9600 models, changing the black
ink from matte to photo or vice versa flushes nearly 220 ml of ink out
of the system (all colors) or OVER $100 US of ink, each time. Also,
after doing this a couple of times you need to replace the waste ink
receptor, another $40 cost.
When I warn people that Epson (and others) design their printers with
ink wastage in mind, because they make their money on ink and other
consumables, it is not just some fantasy. Remember when the ink
cleaning cycles were separate for black and colored inks? They got rid
of that also, because now each cleaning or purging cycle uses ink from
each cartridge or chamber. Had Epson used a separate black pump and
cleaning station in the 7600, for instance, the ink waste on switching
between matte and photo inks would have been reduced to 1/6th the
amount. Yes, it also cuts cost to the cost of the printer. One less
pump mechanism, a unified cleaning station, one less button on the front
of the panel. But considering even their cheap letter sized printers
had two systems until fairly recently, and considering that the black
ink system tends to need special care because any clog shows up clearly,
and the black inks are not exchangeable between two types, it would have
been economically sound to have a second pump in the design.
By far, the cheapest Epson printers to run, have no chip in the
cartridge, use only four colors, and have separate black and colored ink
cleaning stations. The 900 and 980 in letter size were by far the best
going, with their variable dot. They were also ruggedly made, and many
are still in use (they also had relatively large cartridges). To even
make it cheaper, buy generic inks or ink cartridges, refill, or use a
ink system which uses bulk bottles. (Can't do a lot of this with the
2200, and that also, is not by accident).
Art
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