It is beyond me why any sane person would purchase a low price Epson printer. Not because they are no good, they are a really nice product but due to the cost of actually using one. In other posts I have suggested that using third party cartridges or copies is a good way of reducing the cost, providing you purchase good ones. Here at Fillink we do sell the good ones and a delivery of new stock arrived today. The sneaky little electronic chips Epson use to make it difficult to make these products have until now been vanquished by the version 5 circuits on our third party cartridges. This new delivery however has version 6 chips. This can only mean that our suppliers have got wind of the fact that, either new Epson printers will not accept version 5 chips or there is an updated driver now available that renders version 5 chips unusable or worse, both. Beware, do not update the driver for your Epson printer and do not purchase version 5 chipped cartridges for your recently purchased printer.
The most common current Epson cartridges on the market today by far are the to711, to712, to713 and to714, black, yellow, cyan and magenta.
Most of our Epson customers use them. Cartridges of this type are able to contain a little under 20ml of ink. A year ago we noticed that they only contained 14ml and recently only 7.4ml in the black and 5.5 in the colour.
This means that Epson has been stealthily increasing the price of these cartridges without you noticing by reducing the amount of ink. Typically they cost around £12 each. Compare this to ours containing 19ml at £5 and you can see just how much you are being ripped off.
It has just come to our attention that canon printers that are sold with the 37 black and 38 colour low capacity cartridges should be able to use the 40 black and 41 colour high capacity cartridges. They are the same size but if you remove the lid of the low capacity one you find that half of the internal volume is used up by a huge lid. Many of our customers have returned either the black or colour XL cartridges claiming that they are being rejected by the printer and we have obliged with a refund in all cases.
Today a customer brought her printer to us and we observed that the printer did indeed reject the cartridge but, and here is the shocker, only if you mix the low and hi capacity cartridges. When we replaced both the low capacity cartridges with high capacity ones they worked!
Inkjet printers waste a lot of ink. The following video from youtube illustrates this beautifully. The conclusion is not quite correct however. Some printers waste more than others. We have found that HP and Brother printers are by far the most efficient in their usage of ink, only using a few percent in their maintenence cycles. Epson and Cannon printers can waste up to half of the ink you purchase. There is a way to reset this Epson problem for free with some clever software you can download from this blog. Click here to read the info.
