Nat!'s Web Journal

The Epson Stylus Photo 810

This printer has one purpose in life: to waste my ink as quickly as possible. Even at discount prices of €25 for color and €29 for black, this is no losing proposition for the Seiko/Epson corporation. Turn on the printer, it cleans its inking system. What does it use for cleaning ? My ink. Did I leave the printer unused for more than a few days ? Ghastly stripes appear on my printout. That necessitates some cleaning. This wastes more of my expensive ink.

If you think one pass of cleaning and test pattern printing is enough, think again! Ten passes of cleaning/printing test patterns is no unlucky exception but the norm.

Doing this wastes approximately 10 % of the ink! Or € 5.
I pay €5 everytime I want to print something at regular EPSON prices, because I print very rarely, just because Epson´s technology sucks.

No matter if only one pixel is missing of one color, each cleaning operation cleans ALL colors. The waste is enormous and intentional.

Luckily there is some third party product ink available, where Certtone is apparently the cheapest. The cleaning operation is now cost-reduced to a bit more than € 1, with prices of €5.60 for black and €6.50 for color. Now this is still way too much, but the pain is definetely less.

Actually technically this product doesn't suck, it blows!