I hate Epson
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.
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Here here! I couldn’t agree more. We have an Epson CX5400 and absolutely hate it. It is designed to just use up cartridges and they are about $80 to replace. Epson also makes them with a neat little electronic lock to keep you from refilling them yourself. Pretty cool huh? And as soon as Costco no longer carries the cartridges, Epson (and all the after market) just jack up the prices!
Our entire family has worked in the computer industry for decades. We will NEVER buy Epson anything again and will steer all our friends and family away as well.
Comment by Mike — 2.12.07 @ 7:20 pm
I went with the R1800. I am a fine art person and do prints of my paintings and photos for fun and profit (someday, sniff). The printer is used daily; I never turn it off. Its output quality and life of print are excellent. I had a problem with it eating some matte heavyweight (I feed one at a time now). Lost a lot of ink trying to recover the heads. Their comment about letting the thing set overnight after a cleaning worked! I guess the ink clog softens with time. What I would like to know is where does all that ink go when used for cleaning? you would think a drain would be needed. Thanks for the diagram on Love - Good work! - W
Comment by Walt — 4.3.07 @ 12:15 pm
Just did a search for ‘why I hate epson’ after going to make a b/w copy and being told I now need to change 3 ink cartridges.
See… the last time I tried to print some black and white text I had to drive to the store and pick up a yellow cartridge because that one was out. But being clever I made sure to pick up an extra magenta and cyan too!!!
HA. It appears that I am still missing the ‘light cyan’ and ‘light magenta’ cartridges. These are 2 of 6 tiny ink cartridges any of which disable the printers ability to print black if it runs out. That’s $180 worth of cartridges going at any given time, $180 that MUST be kept stored alongside the printer just so you have one handy.
I want to throw this damn machine on the lawn of the nearest epson executive. I’m in Los Angeles, so who is closest?
Comment by cseejei — 4.4.07 @ 7:04 am
Nice to read comments that echo my sentiments. In the middle of another cleaning cycle now - it’s going to cost me $30 just to print 4 or 5 photographs. It always does.
Comment by Jeff — 11.23.07 @ 11:27 am
Hi: I agree 100%. I bought a R2200 and had the same problems.I don’t like the manufacturers forcing these high priced cartridges on us. I started a site that gives informaton on refilling and other subjects. I hope you wouldn’t mind me leaving a link.
Visit our blog for more great information on ink and toner cartridges.
Comment by Richard — 1.19.08 @ 10:19 pm
I’ve had the same problem, so I went with generic cartidges and I’m doing great! Go to ebay and buy yourself for $20 inks for couple oh weeks at least! Other then that I’ve bought HP printer lately and it’s not better then Epson with ink consuption. Bottom line - Go Generic! It’s a bull it will damage your printer and you will never need any warranty repair from these companies bc if it brokes - you will throw it anyway. Listen to me
Comment by Karen — 2.12.08 @ 7:11 pm
I have the CX7300 and I hate how quickly the ink runs out, i’ve paid for 4x or 5x more than the printer is worth!
Comment by Kurt Printsmart — 7.13.08 @ 10:36 pm