[svlug] never buy an epson - ANYMORE

[Walt Reed]

On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 09:58:28AM -0700, bruce coston said:
> I loved the old epson I used on my Amiga but good
> drivers for w98 never came out and it died. Recently I
> got an epson because new Mac drivers never came out,
> notice a pattern? I ditched the lemon as it purged far
> more ink 'preventing print problems' than got neat the
> page. [ it purged on every system power cycle and
> needed really frequent refills - I wouldn't even
> recommend that lemon for a Continuous Ink System as it
> still burns too many ink dollars ! ] . Canon does not
> burn the ink so fast and you can get resetting tools
> etc. for recent printers. My hp cartridges quickly
> lost their resolution after several refills,
> eventually the new hp cartridges got so bad they
> lasted about 3 refills. I seriously prefer 'permanent'
> print heads and might even fix 1 of the old canon tub
> printers if I got one. A flood of jets at less than
> cost killed these economical printers and forced me
> into my current eco-disaster habit of just buying new
> printers as they cost less than cartridges. Our
> laser/s heat the house too much in summer vs inkjets,
> no A/C.

I have to "ditto" the sentiment about Epson inkjet printers. The biggest
problem seems to be infrequent print usage. If you print every day, the
printheads don't dry out and it ends up working fairly well, but if you
are an infrequent printer (for example you use a laser for everyday
printing and just wanted a nice printer for photos) the head-clogging
problem is too severe to overcome. At some point, you will be unable to
get a clean test pattern and the built-in cleaning cycle will be
ineffective. At that point, the printer goes in the garbage, or you have
to disassemble the entire thing to get at the print head, but good luck
getting it cleaned manually too. Oh, and your warranty is to short to be
useful.

The inkjet cost per page is also outrageous. I was getting about 50
cents a page for color mixed text (like web pages.)

I have to also agree with the kodak easyshare which works awesome for
4x6 prints. Larger print jobs are sent off to one of the many internet
printing  companies. 

I went to a mid-level color laser, the Ricoh SP C410dn which goes for
about $1K, and prints "near" photo quality IMHO. Clearly, it's not as
good as the kodak, but it's also quite a bit faster, and works great on
embedded photos on web pages and other business documents. I've worked
out that the cost per page on that is around 5 cents per page for
typical color mixed text. Black and white is Very inexpensive on this
printer.

Between the kodak, laser, and commercial print shops, I have no need or
desire to ever go back to inkjet technology.

If I had a need for large-format, I may get a Cannon Pixma...