Tuesday 17 August 2010

Epson Printers


Epson are the most popular brand of printer for the domestic market and offer a wide range of attractively priced printers to suit most requirements. Most of the new printers take one range of cartridges. These mostly take four cartridges one black and one each of cyan, magenta and yellow. Brand new cheap alternative cartridges are available across the range with savings of up to 90% being achievable over genuine cartridges. The new cartridges have microchips on them which can cause recognition problems, do not buy the cheapest you can find, do not change all of your cartridges at once always change them one at a time, we are up to version 7 on the microchip on the most popular cartridges (Epson brings out a new version of microchip to keep in front of the alternative manufacturers) so purchase your cartridges from a trustworthy source or you might end up with the right cartridge but the wrong chip - useless!
Epson printers have fixed print heads that clog up over time causing banding (lines from left to right on your printout) and complete blocking. The only remedy is to do regular print head cleaning from new, don't wait until you have a problem. Using the compatible ink will shorten the life of your printer but by the time it happens you should have saved enough money to replace it several times over.
The modern Epson printers do not measure how much ink is in the cartridge they do a page count and estimate. The result is that even if you use genuine ink when the cartridge says it is empty there will still be ink in it, so you will be throwing it away. Once the counter has reached its maximum it will not print no matter what you do. This is more of an issue with compatible cartridges as they normally have considerably more ink in them than the genuine cartridges. The chip is tweaked so more pages are printed than with the genuine cartridge but ink will still be thrown away. Another alternative is to use cartridges which have a resetting chip there are a lot of cartridges around advertised as double capacity and they do have a double the ink compared to the genuine cartridge but again all you do is throw it away as the printer counts the pages not the ink in the cartridge. Epson are good printers until they go wrong, they can be expensive to fix once the print head is blocked, it's just the waste of ink when it is so expensive to buy in the first place that irritates me. I wouldn't go and buy something and only expect to use three quarters of it but thats what Epson want us to do.

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