As much as I love the print quality of my R800, I have to thoroughly withdraw any recommendation to buy one of these, or any Epson inket as far as I can tell, unless you print very often. As an occasional photo printer, you would be financially better off hiring a personal assistant to be on call to come pick up your flash card and drive back and forth to a photo lab to print your picture.

Each time you go to print after it’s been a while, the printer spits out almost a quarter of it’s ink in “cleaning.” Unfortunately, you’ll also usually have a banded print, which means you do a nozzle check, which shows some small clogs. Now you have to run a cleaning cycle, which uses another 1/8 of your ink. In some cases, this works. This last time for me, it didn’t after 3 cycles. So this print I’m trying to print has cost me somewhere north of 50 bucks. I call tech support, and they say “oh, I’m showing your printer is out of warranty. If you want to continue talking to me, you’ll have to pay $9.99.” I’m like, “Nine ninety nine are you out of your mind?!” And he’s like “Hang on, I have to run a cleaning cycle on my mouth – that bumps the price up to $20.”

I’m about to throw the printer out of the convenient second-story window to my left, as this scenario has repeated itself to various degrees of ink burning every time I go to print. Did I mention it’s over $100 to replace all the ink cartridges? PLEASE AVOID EPSON. Unless you have either money or ink or both burning a hole in your pocket. Note that Epson’s tiny little cloggable nozzles and ridiculous ink wasting cleaning cycles and sky high ink prices are probably ok for pro photographers, who make so much margin on prints they can afford ink wastage for great prints. But I am steering most people away from liquid gold ink guzzling Epson from now on.

I’ve replaced all these inks a couple prints ago… Most of them two days ago when I started trying to print the print I haven’t gotten out yet.