“Empty” Epson ink cartridges actually 20% full

One common gripe with printers is how expensive ink can be, with costs often surpassing that of an all new printer. Now there are reports out that the Epson 9900, a high-end printer that costs about $5000 starts reporting that ink cartridges are empty while they are still 15-20 percent full. For cartridges that can cost around $4000, that is tantamount to throwing away about $600-$800.

Bellevue Fine Art, long fed up with how the Epson 9900 would stop printing when one cartridge hit “1%” capacity, decided to cut into the supposedly empty cartridges to see just how much ink remained. Not surprisingly, Bellevue Fine Art found that there was a lot ink still left. For the 700ml size, about 100-150ml was left unused while the smaller 350ml size had about 60-80ml remaining. That came about to be about 14-22% of the advertised ink volume left inaccessible.

While having ink left unused might have a technical reason, like protecting the ink heads or just a crappy sensor, having advertised ink volume be unusable is less than optimal. If some 100ml of ink is required to protect the printer heads, maybe Epson should include the extra ink on top of the advertised capacity. Hopefully, Epson, as well as other industry firms like HP and Canon will address this longstanding issue.