How to save money by using more ink in your photo printer

More ink, more money, not so !

I’m the proud owner of an Espson R2400 printer, and have been fro a few years and bought it just after it was released. Its undobtedly been superceeded 10 times over by now, but it was quite an investment at the time, prints beautifully when it does print well, and I seem to find an unending supply of cheaper, but original, ink cartridges on E-Bay, making the cost of ownership a little less than it should be.

However its that phrase ‘when it prints well’ that is really the nub of this post.

In all honesty I don’t print that often with the Epson. I use a Canon for printing CD’s and for prints for the children’s homework, and for general run of the mill things. Saving the Epson for portfolio and competition prints, and of course those lovely big A3 prints the Canon can’t do.

I’ve spent this afternoon with the task of printing five A3 prints for a competition tomorrow. In doing this what I actually printed was 9 A3 prints, 3 test prints to unclog print heads and replaced 3 print cartridges.  So what happened and why ?

Well the first two prints were fine, well actually I printed them a week or so ago, or was that two weeks. The first A3 print of the day came out with the very bottom black area all patchy. So then I ran a test print on a bit of A4 plain paper to find that one of the black inks was clogged. The first attempt at cleaning the nozzle didn’t work, so then I did a second clean. Now the Epson utility says to do this sparingly as it does use up a lot of ink. The thing is, it doesn’t tell you how much. Is that 1%, 5%, 10%, more maybe ? So the next rest print seemed fine, well not 100%, but certainly 95%. So at that point I produce the second A3 print, and again the same problem. I run the test print again and it gives patchy results and needs another clean. Just on this point, I wonder where all the ink goes when its cleaning. So at the third attempt I finally get the print I’m after.

The next A3 print works just fine. So thats 4 down and one to go. The last print is a black and white, and off it goes but 80% of the way through it stops and says it s out of ink. I’ve never known it do this before. Its always kept going at then warned me at the end. So anyway, I do as it instructs. But not one empty ink cartridge, but three. So thats £24 at E-Bay prices and in excess of £33 at Epson prices. It primes the new ink, surely not more ink used, and away it goes.  Disappointingly there’s a magenta tint to the last 20% of the print rather than the just slight green cast. So off we go again, yet another piece of A3 in the printer, and I finally have whet I needed. Again I am slightly concerned that there’s more of a magenta cast on this black and white than normal. Also the black and white option doesn’t appear in the menu like it used to . Damn Apple updates, I vaguely remember seeing the Epson mentioned in an update a while back.

So why this blog title ? Well my conclusion in all of this, is that not using your printer regularly does clog up the print heads, and that the subsequent actions to unclog, reprint and continually clean the heads probably costs far more than print a 6″ x 4″ print once a week. So if you haven’t used that lovely expensive photo printer lately, just give it a whirl on a small test print.