You have a perfectly healthy, functioning Epson inkjet printer in your home office. It’s served you well for years and you use it frequently. Then, one day, you go to print a document and realize that the printer isn’t working. A message on the display reads “a part inside your printer is at the end of its service life. Service is required.”
That’s funny, you think. You hadn’t noticed anything wrong with your printer before this message appeared. The device was working well and the quality of the printing was fine. If nothing was broken, why are you suddenly getting this message? More important: how do you get rid of it so that you can continue using your printer?
This should absolutely be criminal behaviour. If there was ever an industry that could do with a worldwide judicial probe and investigation, it’s the printer makers. They employ so many clearly scammy business practices, and get away with them too.
Thom Holwerda,
Here here. I’ll never buy an epson again because of the ink scam. It is deliberate and it affects millions of consumers. They get away with it because it’s not against the law. In the ideal world legislators shouldn’t even have to waste their time with this since companies should just be reasonable to begin with. As much as I hate overregulation it’s total BS that companies are engineering their products to cease prematurely and depriving owners of functionality that was already paid for. You can’t print black and white documents just because some color is out…WTF!
Epson: frankly you deserve a class action lawsuit whereby you have to compensate consumers for every damned instance of your BS.
Alfman,
I had one of these printers. At least I think I had, because it looks almost exactly the same as the video. Yes, there was an ink waste pad, and yes it stopped working. But I’m not 100% sure what the error message was.
It was actually very economical, even with original ink, had “large format” (A3 / 17″x11″) scanning and printing support, and was marketed for office use.
It became a useless waste, and went to recycling. (Fortunately Best Buy had a free program for recycling, otherwise, I would also had to pay an additional fee).
Moral of the story: I never bought any other Epson printer after that.
By “brother” printer from the 80’s still prints fine as long as it gets ribbons that is not too dry (and even then sometimes it works) To save an old ribbon, just put the cartridge next to you as you take a shower (but not close enough that water hits it.) After a warm shower the ribbon is as good as new. I find it cool that CUPS has drivers for it still, and they work. Windows however killed support after windows 95 and nt4 i think. 98 and 2000 can not print for some reason on this old clunker. (not that i bother with windows anyways)
@Alfman
The inability to print black&white when color ink is out is infuriating, and that’s not an over-statement. I *HOPE* Epson gets served and loses their ass in a class action lawsuit over this. They deserve it! I don’t currently own any Epson printers and this crap guarantees I won’t in the future either.
On some models with scanner, the scanner even refuses to work if no ink is present.
My good ol’ Epson FX-80 never has failed me that much though…
Epson FX series were amazingly strong and durable, only comparable to OKI Microline printers.
@friedchicken
It’s not just Epson. Recently I came across some Kyocera printers that had started blocking / hindering print output when a generic ink / toner cartridge is detected. Once a generic ink / toner cartridge or drum is detected the new firmware continually prompts the user to accept liability by requiring a 3 second press of two keypad keys before allowing the queued jobs to proceed. This is borderline extortion and I believe it is criminal.
It would be like a car maker having a non-standard refuelling nozzle and requiring you to accept liability before you could drive on a different brand of fuel. Will Tesla require a disclaimer for filthy 50Hz users?
This printer issue is not taken seriously because of the low individual unit cost, but globally it’s billions of dollars in extortion!
Epson, Kyocera, Lexmark (HP), …
Meanwhile, Brother makes honest printers (no DRMed cartridges which means there are third-party ink cartridges, none of this end-of-life scammy behaviour) but nobody buys them because people just don’t care enough.
I mean, most people don’t bother to check if a printer takes third-party/remanufactured cartridges before they buy the printer, it’s usually only after they see the cost of first-party ink cartridges that they realise they should have checked.
Buyers get what they vote for with their wallets.
kurkosdr,
Good to know. My epson still worked, and I was unhappy having to toss it prematurely but I couldn’t take any more of epson’s ink cartridge BS. I replaced it with an HP laser printer.
I agree with this. People (myself included) often don’t know what the problems with a product will be until they happen to us.
I don’t think that’s always the case. You vote with your wallet for what you expect a product to be at time of sale, but that does not necessarily mean the product will deliver. Especially if a product has undisclosed limitations.
If the limitations were prominently disclosed at time of sale, then I could agree with your statement.
Indeed, gone full Brother since 2005, why Bother with Epson ?
To be honest, all online comparisons of inkjet printers that I have seen in the last couple of years do mention ink usage per page and the cost of ink refills. They do not go as far as producing a yearly-usage-tco figure, and that is quite understandable, as printer usage might vary wildly, but it should at least give an idea to the unwary buyer that this is an issue that should not be overlooked.
As for myself, I stopped buying both Epson and HP, based on their silly policies of forced refill replacement. Brother and Canon seem to way less obnoxious in that regard, but who knows how the market will evolve ina couple of years from now…
Brother also has their “issues”… I have one (MFC-440CN) and a couple friends of mine also have Brother MFCs (one has a MFC-460-or-something, the other has a couple modern J-series). They all will turn on automatically in the middle of the night and perform head cleaning, wasting a lot of ink. Mine is always disconnected of mains, only on when I need to print.
But I agree in general with you.
We have an inkvestment tank brother at work one of the tabloid sized models… and it’s ink has lasted over a year, and is still more than half full and it is used. So, id say if it is doing any cleaning it isn’t wasting TOO much at least on that model… I’d rather it waste a page of ink a week than have the print head get clogged due to dried out ink on the head.
They do it to prevent from dry up. You can change time of this auto cleaning (although I don`t know if you can switch it off)
Not anymore, just try finding compatible carts for their MFC-J1205W printer, which was the only model available during the chip shortage which I picked up because I never had problems with finding replacement ink…nope, its DRMed as is their newest models, you can only use $70+ a set OEMs as nobody has broken the DRM.
For better or worse, this is a side-effect of the race to to bottom with printers. Consumer inkjets are so ridiculously cheap considering the engineering and parts involved, that they are essentially treated as disposable. When you can buy a printer-scanner combo with duplex, Wifi, USB stand-alone printing and so on, including all the precision mechanical parts needed for less than €100, something has to give. And all the manufacturers do it in one way or another, particularly on their cheap models. People saying Brother are the “honest” ones probably haven’t read the reports about their recent firmware update that stops some printers working with non-genuine toner cartridges.
We’re all to blame by expecting anything more while buying printers at retail prices as low as €40 in some cases. The last ink printer I bought was an Epson R800, which cost around €300 at the time. It was an incredible printer, and still to this day cannot be matched in terms of quality by most consumer printers. But it costs a fortune to put ink in it without a CISS modification, and of course there’s a huge range of quality when it comes to 3rd party inks. Cheap cartridges might be fine for printing a boarding pass or something, but for printing anything decent or with consistency, you need to use high quality ink, and there’s usually not much difference in price between OEM and 3rd party at that level.
Over its lifetime, it too had this issue once where it gave an error message that corresponded to having a full overflow. I disassembled the printer, and indeed it was completely sodden and starting to leak over the bottom of the printer body, so it can’t really be blamed for that. I cleaned it up, washed out the pad and used a service tool to reset the overflow counter. It’s still running just fine to this day, voracious appetite for ink aside. If I hadn’t repaired it myself, it might have been still worth getting it serviced by Epson to resolve the issue, but with a super cheap printer it’s probably more economical to bin it. And that’s where the issue is really.
daedalus,
I would kindly disagree.
The Epson printer I had was not cheap. It had moderate priced printer and moderate priced ink, instead of the more common cheap printer / expensive ink combo.
But it still had to go to waste.
This is even true for “Eco Tank” printers some of which sell for $1,000:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow6eqZELeBI
(Eco Tank uses ink containers instead of cartridges, and are supposed to last for years).
daedalus,
That theory makes sense on the surface, but epson is pushing the same crap on expensive printers too. Mine was an epson stylus photo, the equivalent of mine sells for ~$440 on amazon today. They still engineered the product with restrictions designed to stop working until the consumer installs more OEM ink.
Personally I needed to print B&W documents maybe 98% of the time, yet it was making me buying color ink much more than that. According to this consumer reports investigation, many printers waste half their ink and some printers waste up to 80% of their ink…
https://www.consumerreports.org/printers/the-high-cost-of-wasted-printer-ink/
Below that there’s a table showing an epson printer with automatic maintenance cycles adding $158 annually for ink that never reaches the page. They compare this to a brother printer costing $3.40 on ink for annual maintenance cycles.
That hits close to home for me since epson was frequently forcing me to buy 5 color cartridges in addition to the black cartridge that I actually needed for the vast majority of my print jobs. That was so much wasted ink my epson printer was forcing me to pay for. It is a scam and I’m sure that millions of consumers are affected by it. Engineered ink waste must cost customers hundreds of millions of dollars collectively. Not only is it very costly, but it exacerbates our waste problem.
Buy a laser printer. Really. Have a Brother HL-2460 : B&W only, 600 dpi, no recto/verso. However OEM cartridge (TN-9500) are around 130€, compatible around 50 €, but last up to 11000 pages. Best value money can buy.
Kochise,
Yes, I replaced the epson with a laser as mentioned in another post. I am happy with it.
Knowing what I know now it’s an obvious choice to not buy epson hardware designed to scam you on ink. The decision to toss an otherwise decent printer that I already owned wasn’t taken lightly, however in my case I was regularly throwing away $$ (not to mention ink) on cartridges that weren’t even being used. This is objectively stupid, yet you end up doing it because your printer forces you to do it. Good riddance.
I was going to write the obligatory “why are there are still inkjets sold.” post but then I looked at prices, inflation has hit color laser jets hard. A color laser jet is close to being an investment at this point,. Entry level is like $300-$400 USD. Still worth it, IHMO, if you have a budget that will accommodate it. I lived that inkjet life for too long I know the lure of cheap initial prices is difficult to ignore. Maybe this one will actually last! Or this one has a scanner/copier it has to be better built with cheaper ink. But it always breaks or becomes cheaper to buy a new one than refil the old one with ink.
The brother inkvestment printer we have is holding up well as is the ink supply… and it isn’t crazy expensive to refill compared to the cost of the printer. It does seem they don’t come in stock as frequently as the regular cartridge printers though.
That said the prices on the latest gen models are double what they should be if not more. Which is very strange as they continue to manufacture several generations previous models… for example MFC-J6535DW would have been about $350 last year, and the 5000 and 4000 series printers are still coming in stock with basically the same specs is quite odd how their lineup works.
Bought my Brother color laser in 2020 for around 570€ at a little computer shop, was 490 € on Amazon but is now at 729 € there.
Always go for laser : never dry up, the print don’t fear water, you can make PCB with it (ironing), etc.
Kochise,
I’ve never done that. I’m very curious what you’ve done with PCBs and how the results came out 🙂
Pretty good actually. You can have an idea of the process via https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=laser+printer+pcb
Kochise,
The reason I haven’t tried is because I don’t want to deal with the chemical waste. Do you know how much you can reuse them and what the shelve life is after it’s been prepared?
It is cool that one can DIY it, but in practice I don’t know I can justify it when someone else can probably do it better for cheaper…then again after a brief search I may have to take that back.
https://pcbshopper.com/
Once minimum quantity and shipping are factored in the price even just a 4in X 4in board is outrageous. Many have a min quantity of 5, which isn’t totally unreasonable, but it’s quite wasteful and expensive for one off prototypes that have yet to be tested. And for the Chinese suppliers I wouldn’t want to wait a month every design iteration. Can anyone recommend US supplier that’s reasonably priced for one-off prototypes?
Alfman,
I have used https://oshpark.com/ in the past. It is not the cheapest, however it got the job done. (But I ended up discarding the project for other reasons).
Anyway, other economic factors mix in, like cost of packing, shipping, handling your individual files, physically getting them off the printer etc. So I would not expect anything less than $5 shipped, regardless of how small the board is. At least for a relatively fast and reliable service.
I wasn’t expecting $5, but I also wasn’t expecting $50 – $100, which most seem to be haha. $5 per square inch would make my fictitious prototype board $80.
I’m sure you’d get a chuckle at seeing any of the electronic projects I’ve built by hand. Custom PCBs would go a long way although I have to be very careful with budgeting since unfortunately I don’t have much disposable income to play around with.
I fantasize about having my own house and a workshop…but that’s out of reach for now. I look at these DIY youtubers who’ve got spacious houses and beautiful workshops and wonder how they can afford all of that. I must be in the wrong line of business, haha.
Alfman,
I think the YouTube channel pays for those homes.
But it is a chicken and egg problem. Until you have 10,000s of followers, and millions of views, it does not actually convert to a real income.
According to: https://mint.intuit.com/blog/relationships/how-much-do-youtubers-make/
For replacing an entry level engineer salary in Nebraska (random example) at $58k, one would need 11.6 million views per year. I am sure most high profile channels can easily do that.
Though I personally would not want to drop my current job in search of such an audience.
I’ve done the laser toner resist trick many times, it’s great for prototypes and one offs. I generally have obtained the best success using HP Lasers, Toner combined HP Premium paper. I think the premium quality highly calendered paper is probably the most important aspect of the process.
Another great trick rather than use an clothes iron which can sometimes shift the paper, is to squeeze the PCB and print between sheets of baking paper in a flat face sandwich press. You get a much better result that way, the baking paper helps moderate the heating process and gives you a bit more subtle time control, It also stops your partner complaining about there toasted sandwiches smelling like laser toner!
Good to know, thank.
Something similar is with cash register. They have to do about 2000 end summaries and then go to read-only states. Why? Because law say they need to do at least that number. So manufacturers let them do onyl this. And then you mostly need to buy new one (you can change memory, but it cost near like new one).