No more epson printers for me

Ever since I’ve started tutoring, I asked Cart if he had a printer for me to use for printing out handouts, worksheets and whatnots.

Cart owns an Epson stylus photo printer that he bought some years back. At the time, he was impressed by the print quality as because this particular model uses two types of ink cartridges : a  5-colour cartridge and black one.

Each ink cartridge uses a chip (like what you see on top there) which will indicate to the printer of how much ink that is has left. Which is quite smart (although my old printers have the same function even with no inbuilt chip)

However, after using the printer, Cart eventually found out that one undesirable thing about this printer is that if either one one of the colours run out, the printer would not function at all.

So lets say, I use a lot of blue in my printwork and eventually the colour runs out. What will happen is that the printer will lock up even though the rest of the cartridges are full! Even if I just wanted my next document to printed in black.

Yikes! Making consumers buy a new cartridge altogether when just one colour runs out? What a waste of resources. That’s strike one.

But well, we sucked it up and headed to an ink cartridge shop to get some new ink and did a few print test page on it to get the ink flowing. The colours were faint at first but slowly ink started to flow out and I was feeling hopeful. But after a few nozzle cleanings, to our horror, the printer indicated that once again, it ran out of ink!

Huh? I was befuddled. The inks were brand new so they shouldn’t be acting up like that! What a waste of money!

And once again, the printer locked up. Strike two.

Something seems very fishy about the whole deal and Cart was so furious that he did a search online and bought for himself a chip resetter which costs about 10 euro. What it does is that it will reset the chip and make the printer think that the cartridge was brand new with full ink.

And behold, we were able to continue printing. It’s not a perfect print, but it should get better as the ink flows.

But what was interesting is that we found out later that using the chip resetter with the old ink cartridges, the printer was able to whip out a fully coloured document! Which means that the cartridge was not empty in the first place. Look at what Cart printed out.

Epson. What a deceitful thing to do. Who was the smart person who approved of this concept? If they think that this is a profitable idea of forcing consumers buy more printer ink, instead this will make users boycott this brand even more.

No more Epson printer for me.