Further to my earlier rant about printers, it also transpires that ours is nearly out of ink, and it’s almost £50 for a set of 5 cartridges – that’s including photo black. Now, everyone knows this is a rip off, so that got me looking at the Epson ecotank. The printer is expensive, £200, but the ink comes in bottles that are 70ml, that’s approximately ten times as much as an XL cartridge for my current printer, and they cost similar – £8 or so, but it only takes four.

BUT

The printer itself comes with four full bottles of ink. That would be £500 worth of ink in my current printer, which makes £200 look like a bargain.

The reviews say it’s ideal for business people, but even though my volumes are not high £50 is just too damn much for ink cartridges. I’ve spent probbaly £300 on ink since I’ve had the printer, and it wasn’t cheap to buy either.

Bump?

Dunno, I think the are fairly new, which may be why not much response. Does the ink dry out in the nozzles if you aren’t a regular user, like a business would be? That would be my question.

I have one of those HP instant ink accounts, that’s working out OK for me on the £1.99/month volume level, maybe another to consider and the printers are much cheaper up front.

As tthew says – if you aren’t going to use it every day you still have the problems of it clogging up and then having to bin it.

I’m going for a laser printer next. Colour ones aren’t too expensive these days. I print a photo once a year so I could do that at Jessops

Bought an HP one now, with instant ink. Looks to be much cheaper. Also we print more photos than text documents so it’s even better.

I saw this on a program about how expensive ink cartridges are. Seems it’s the way most people will probably end up going in the end who have the capital to outlay when purchasing the printer and want to use it regularly.

The logic being at the moment that the printer was cheap and you pay more for ink to cover the fact you got the expensive electronics cheap.

I’ve opted to go the small home laser option which so far has been excellent for me compared to inkjet printing. I don’t print photos at all so no worries there.

As tthew says – if you aren’t going to use it every day you still have the problems of it clogging up and then having to bin it.

Modern ink jets self clean – I rarely use our Epson R2000 Ink Jet, but always works fine when I do.