Printer cartridges Epson flags as empty still have a lot of ink in the tank
Seven years later, not much has changed.
Bellevue Fine Art Reproduction, a printing company in the Seattle, Washington area, recently published a video on YouTube showing that a pro-grade Epson 9900 series printer had as much as 20 percent of its ink left in the tank when officially empty, as first reported by ArsTechnica.
Epson was not available for comment at this writing, but we’ll update this post if the company responds to our query.
Throwing out ink-loaded cartridges is bad enough when you’re buying refills for consumer-grade inkjets for $25 to $50. But when you get into high-end printers like an Epson Stylus Pro 9900 you’re looking at a machine that loads eleven cartridges at once, and each costs more than $200.
Bellevue Fine Art says it loses hundreds of dollars in wasted ink every month, and so far it says Epson hasn’t been receptive to complaints.
The reproduction company came to its conclusions by weighing full cartridges. Then they weighed them a second time once they were “empty” and divided the difference by 1.08—the weight in grams for one millimeter of ink, acording to Bellevue Fine Art.
The impact on you at home: Owning an Epson 9900 is an expensive proposition and only makes sense for businesses requiring high quality printing. Nevertheless, Bellevue Fine Art’s story serves as a reminder that just because your printer says an inkjet cartridge is empty doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the case. In fact, if you print a lot of pages every week you could end up throwing away hundreds of dollars by the end of year. How far you want to push your cartridge past the “empty” point is up to you, although you should also take into account any warnings from the manufacturer about doing so.