Epson and all others must come to their senses!

I would like to start by saying that I don’t regret buying this printer. Unfortunately, there is as with any printer I’ve had a big HOWEVER that follows. The only reason I don’t feel sorry for the purchase is the price I paid - $50. For the price of admission I got about a year of very nice prints. I have to say that luckily my bosses at work are very nice and don’t mind us using the office printers for personal stuff, which is why I use my home printer very lightly, mostly for pictures and every now and then for some paper or directions I need to print. This is why I’ve lasted almost a year on the original ink cartridges. Unfortunately, those are finally running out and it’s time to replace. This is when something inside me wants to scream, because to this day I can’t understand how an entire printer with a complete set of cartridges could cost less than the replacements ink. I am finding myself thinking about getting another printer tomorrow on a Thanksgiving sale for $20, which ironically will be my 6th printer in the last four years, simply because every time it just doesn’t make sense to buy new ink. So to get my utter frustration with the matter I decided to write this review.

As I already said – if it weren’t for the high cost of the replacement cartridges, I wouldn’t be looking at another printer. I liked my previous Canon printer, the ink for which was about $12 for the black, and $6 for the color, but the printer itself didn’t last very long, so it was time to replace. I decided on the Epson because of the CD printing capability. I record a lot of my own music, as well as TV stuff on DVD, and love the ability to make good looking labels. After considering my options, I thought that $50 was a good deal and inkjet printing certainly gives a lot of options for label customization. I was also excited by the fact that there are 6 individual ink tanks, and they cost the reasonable $12 a piece, with the promise that you will just have to replace them one at a time or so. Well the thing is that the prints are beautiful, all of them, I love the CD labels; I love the pictures, even the text looks almost like laser quality. But the idea of the cost saving individual cartridges is simply ridiculous. As one can expect they don’t just run out one at a time. So if we do the math the black ink is of course the most expensive one and it needs to be replaced most often – so naturally it costs $18 or so. The five color tanks are around 12 dollars a piece. That’s $78! For a printer that cost $50.

So let’s look beyond cost here. As I already said the printer does a beautiful job, better than any other I’ve had. Set up was simple, as it turned out my Windows XP had the drivers built in, so I could’ve done without the installation CD, but to get the full functionality I had to install the CD printing software. This was major disappointment. The software gets the job done, but just barely. The interface seems very dated and is a far cry from user friendly. Text is very hard to format for printing, and images are even worse. The good part is that printing on CDs uses very little ink, which somewhat helps with the cost. Pictures on the other hand use up a lot of ink. The photos are beautiful though with very realistic colors, much better than any other photo printer I’ve had.

This is, however, a bare bones printer, with no fancy preview screens, memory card slots, or lots of buttons. To me this is an advantage since I’ve found that it’s never that easy to control a printer with its own buttons. This simplistic approach feels a lot easier to me, but that’s a personal preference. One thing I was not happy with was the start up speed. The printer goes through an extremely lengthy start up routine before you get the first print out. Once it starts though, the printing speed is quite good, and in the year I’ve used it I have never had one jam or a wasted page. I have also never had to perform nozzle cleaning, or any other maintenance. This has been another first with printers. As usual, the USB cable needed to connect to a computer is not included.

I am very upset about the cost of the replacement ink, as I really love this printer. It is very simple to use, has a great print quality, and has had absolutely no jams or problems of any kind. Only because of the cost of the ink I am considering getting another canon printer for the routine text and photo jobs. I am definitely keeping the Epson though for the CD/DVD label prints.