Ink poured out of cartridges that Bellevue Fine Art Reproduction printer said was spent
Ink poured out of cartridges that Bellevue Fine Art Reproduction’s Epson printer said was spent

If you get fed up when your home printer says it’s running low on ink, imagine how a professional fine art printer must feel.

Scott Moore, owner of Bellevue Fine Art Reproduction, decided to start dissecting his “empty” cartridges from his Epson 9900 printer and found that they can have nearly a quarter of their ink still inside.

“It’s been pretty expensive,” Moore said. “We end up throwing about $50 per cartridge away. And when you’re throwing away 10 cartridges a month, that adds up.”

Most of the time, a printer says it’s out of ink when all it really needs is a good cleaning. Most printers will self-clean, but sometimes they fail to clean when they sense the ink is too low. But Moore has found that his 700mL cartridges often have more than 100mL of ink still inside.

When one of Moore’s two printers says a cartridge is getting empty, someone on his team will weigh the cartridge to see if excessive ink is left inside. Sometimes, as much as 180mL will be left in a 700mL cartridge. If that’s the case, a full cartridge can be inserted to finish cleaning and the old cartridge can be reinstalled after that so the last bits of ink can be used. But with Moore’s high-volume operation, time wasted cleaning print heads and switching out cartridges is money down the drain.

“When you start having five, six, sometimes every single ink blinking, it’s not even practical,” Moore said.

For home users, the solution might be to go outside the normal supply chain, getting third-party inks that are usually much cheaper. But that’s not an option for Bellevue Fine Art Reproductions.

“A lot of people point out [in the YouTube comments] that they have problems with third-party inks,” Moore said. “The other problem is is that we do fine art printing, and we certify that everything we do is archival. …The only way for me to use third-party inks would be for me to no longer stand by my prints.”

Moore has even reached out to Epson to see if there was something they could do about. “Someone got back to me after a couple months and it was a really brain-dead response, like ‘Was the power on?'” Moore said.

Updated 9/16/15 with Epson comment: According to an Epson spokeswoman, the Epson 9900 has two mechanisms to monitor ink levels. One mathematically figures out how much ink is used with each print job and another relies on a physical sensor built into the cartridge. Both estimate remaining ink conservatively “to assure there is enough ink to completely eliminate any print head obstructions and ensure quality output.”

“However, users have the choice to swap out a cartridge that is reporting low levels for a fuller cartridge for the cleaning maintenance as needed, and then replace it with the original cartridge to use the remaining ink,” the spokeswoman said. “The original cartridge does not need to be discarded.”

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