Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Printing: Printers, Papers and Inks => Topic started by: alangubbay on January 04, 2015, 12:20:50 pm
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I have recently bought this printer and I am quite devastated by the massive ink consumption. Even if I do not use the machine for one day it goes through the whole cleaning process and and wastes ink. One can see the levels going down. So far it has cost some $150 for a few small prints! I have used Epson printers for many years but but have never encountered this before. Epson do not argue when I threaten to junk the machine. Has anyone else come across this?
Alan
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Many of us can't even buy one yet. Not shipping in USA until February or March, 2015 ;)
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epson always does this terrible company, my epson 7600 did this years ago, I wonder if it is getting worse.
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I have recently bought this printer and I am quite devastated by the massive ink consumption. Even if I do not use the machine for one day it goes through the whole cleaning process and and wastes ink. One can see the levels going down. So far it has cost some $150 for a few small prints! I have used Epson printers for many years but but have never encountered this before. Epson do not argue when I threaten to junk the machine. Has anyone else come across this?
Alan
I know nothing about this printer, so what I say here may be wrong. Judging from my experience with a suite of previous Epson professional printers, the initial charge-up of ink draws down a lot out of the cartridges, but much of that ink fills the lines and is still used for printing. Some goes into the waste tank. I don't know the split. As for the automatic cleaning cycles, every time I got a new printer one of the first things I did was to switch all that stuff OFF. I do a nozzle check before each printing session. If there are clogged nozzles I clean them and then do a manual nozzle check to be sure. This is a "clean if necessary but don't necessarily clean" approach, which saves a lot of time and money and works. But I repeat - not sure how relevant any of this is to the new technology.
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I know nothing about this printer, so what I say here may be wrong. Judging from my experience with a suite of previous Epson professional printers, the initial charge-up of ink draws down a lot out of the cartridges, but much of that ink fills the lines and is still used for printing. Some goes into the waste tank. I don't know the split. As for the automatic cleaning cycles, every time I got a new printer one of the first things I did was to switch all that stuff OFF. I do a nozzle check before each printing session. If there are clogged nozzles I clean them and then do a manual nozzle check to be sure. This is a "clean if necessary but don't necessarily clean" approach, which saves a lot of time and money and works. But I repeat - not sure how relevant any of this is to the new technology.
As this is an amateur printer, there is no way to turn off the nozzle check. But my printer doesn't go through that cycle that I'm used from my older x900 printers before I did the same as you, Mark, that is to shut off all this automatic cleaning. I haven't experienced any clogging problem during the month that I've been printing with the SC P600, except once. Very easy to fix, took just one cleaning to get rid of that.
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NOW you realize that Epson is also in the ink business.
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Yes, I have always known that. However, this latest aspect is just not acceptable. Trying Epson again today I got a more sympathetic person. I understand that this has been a known problem with the 3000 printer which was fixed by a firmware update. She is trying to find one for the P600. Otherwise they will have to collect the printer and refund my money. I also expect some compensation for the wasted ink.
Alan
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Sad to say, but this thread is highly appropriate to my new P600 printer (one week old) experience as well. After two hours on the phone with Epson technical support, Epson is kindly sending me a new P600 printer, but after rereading this thread and comparing it to my own current experience with my new P600 unit, and also just reading a PC Magazine Review complaining about "auto cleaning cycles" on the P600, I regret to say, I truly doubt there's anything "defective" about my first P600 printer. More likely it's the natural Epson design specification of the beast. I may very well be wasting my time taking delivery of a replacement unit, boxing up and shipping back the old one, and setting up the new one. I've posted some comments about the issue here:
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com/news.73.html
The PC magazine review is here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2478570,00.asp
There's a lot to like about this new P600 printer and HD ink technology, but if Epson doesn't get a handle on this wasted "auto clean" ink scenario real soon, I suspect the consumer/prosumer market will deliver an unkind verdict to Epson in the not too distant future.
kind regards,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
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fwiw, after 25 full 13x19 sheets, im at about 50% capacity of the original ink set
that comes to about 6$/page
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fwiw, after 25 full 13x19 sheets, im at about 50% capacity of the original ink set
that comes to about 6$/page
But how much ink was used to charge the ink lines when the printer was first set up?
Brian A
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But how much ink was used to charge the ink lines when the printer was first set up?
Brian A
It's difficult to say because the visual ink level indicator is designed to register on full right after the first carts have been installed. In fact, I made several letter-size prints the first day and only the light magenta cartridge began to show a just perceptible drop from full. I then didn't print with the P600 for a couple of days, and that's when my decision to do a nozzle check caused the printer to preemptively initiate a cleaning cycle. I was surprised to see a perfect nozzle check pattern taking so long to print, so I printed another nozzle check whereupon the machine did a second stealth leaning cycle. In neither case had I pressed the menu to run a cleaning cycle. The P600 initiated both cleaning cycles ahead of printing the nozzle check patterns, not afterward as would be done if I had chosen to clean. At that point I checked the ink level indicator and all the cartridges (except for the MK which was not in use) had noticeably dropped. The ink levels then looked like this: (see attached image).
Given that the auto clean mode is not user selectable on the P600, and the soon-to-be-on-the-market P800 has much larger cartridges capacity, and (hopefully like the 3880) user replaceable waste tank, and with any luck manual/auto clean modes that will be user selectable, I think purchasing a P800 over a P600 is going to be a no-brainer for anyone who plans to do any more than the very very occasional print.
cheers,
Mark
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It's difficult to say because the visual ink level indicator is designed to register on full right after the first carts have been installed. ...
I realized this after reading Keith Copper's review of the printer. The only way to tell would be by weighing the cartridges before and immediately after initializing. Otherwise there would be no reliable way of estimating print costs based on the first set of cartridges.
Brian A
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I realized this after reading Keith Copper's review of the printer. The only way to tell would be by weighing the cartridges before and immediately after initializing. Otherwise there would be no reliable way of estimating print costs based on the first set of cartridges.
Brian A
And that would remain unreliable because you don't know how much of the total weight to distribute between the ink and the container, and how much of the initial ink charge remains in the lines to be used for prints versus the amount going into the waste tank.
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...The only way to tell would be by weighing the cartridges before and immediately after initializing. Otherwise there would be no reliable way of estimating print costs based on the first set of cartridges.
Brian A
I understand. However, I don't get too hung up trying to figure out what is the "true" cost of a single perfect print on a particular paper. It's a bit of an academic exercise, IMHO. If you really want to track total ownership costs and amortize over all the good prints, you need to keep pretty copious notes, including how many rejected prints you have made to date due to both human error and printer error issues. I had two reject prints in the first six prints I made on my first day with the P600. The first print was bad because the Epson install package automatically installed an "AirPrint" driver on my Mac instead of the conventional Wi-fi driver, and I didn't notice it until I sent the first application managed color print to the printer over wi-fi. The AirPrint driver had no clue what to do with "Photoshop manages colors" even though it happily transferred RGB mystery meat values to the printer. So, the print was a color management disaster. I had to uninstall and manually reinstall the correct Epson driver. The second reject print occurred trying to set up the thicker third party HN Photo Rag Pearl. Hahnemuhle recommended Premium Luster paper as the correct setting even though the paper has to go through the feed path for fine art papers. The driver thus defaulted to .3mm thickness setting and standard platten gap. The P600 has no "auto" setting for platten gap, either, unlike my Epson 3880 which at least gives you a fighting chance when loading in untried new media. Given that the fine art paper feed tray is specified for 0.7mm minimum thickness paper and Epson defaults to 0.5mm for its OEM fine art papers, one might hope the .3mm setting for Premium luster paper would have been overridden by a default to .5mm at the very least since it was being fed through the thick paper tray and the P600 does detect where the paper is or isn't. Anyway, I should have first found the hidden menu for thickness and platten setting (not discussed at all in the owner's basic guide shipped with the printer, BTW) and thus double checked. My bad. Even so, the platten gap also needed to be set to "wide" which is the only other choice on the P600. So, I got my first head strike. Ouch >:(
Anyway, one could say that there was some operator error involved in both print failures I described, but this is all too common in the "joy" of home printing, and when people don't track total cost of ownership and actual productivity yields in an ongoing basis, I tend to take all the reported per print costs with a grain of salt. ;D
Suffice to say, convenience, pride in one's craftsmanship, total control over final print quality and print permanence, are my reasons to do my own printing. Home printing has never competed well in terms of cost per print when compared to bargain basement digital printing services like you find at most of the Big Box retailers.
best,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
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And that would remain unreliable because you don't know how much of the total weight to distribute between the ink and the container, and how much of the initial ink charge remains in the lines to be used for prints versus the amount going into the waste tank.
What? It is as accurate as it gets. It doesn't matter where it is gone to. When it is gone it is gone.
Brian A
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What? It is as accurate as it gets. It doesn't matter where it is gone to. When it is gone it is gone.
Brian A
Not so. If you are starting from the initial charge-up using the packaged cartridges and trying from that to measure the cost of ink per print or per square foot of printed media, you need to know (1) how many ml of ink are contained in the start-up cartridges Epson provides with the printer, (2) how many ml of ink goes into the waste tank due to the initial charge-up, and (3) from those two data points, the residual ink available for prints. (4) Once you know how many ml of residual ink for prints there are, and how many sq. ft. you printed with that volume of ink, dividing the one into the other, you derive the ml/sq.ft. of printed media. (5) Then, once you know the price of the 80ml replacement inks, you derive the price per ml of that ink, multiply this by the # of ml/sq.ft. and you will have the cost of ink per sq.ft. of printed media that you can expect on an on-going basis.
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(5) Then, once you know the price of the 80ml replacement inks, you derive the price per ml of that ink, multiply this by the # of ml/sq.ft. and you will have the cost of ink per sq.ft. of printed media that you can expect on an on-going basis.
The only problem is that this number varies greatly based on image content. I print with a Canon iPF6400 and the software gives me a pretty precise amount of ink used. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it gives me ink used all the way down to 1/1000th of a mL. (ie. 0.000mL). I can see a huge difference between dark and light images and would say this number easily varies by at least a factor of 2. I just did this analysis and found that I can get anywhere from 160 square inches per mL of ink down to only 90 (this isn't quite 2 to 1 mind you) for dark images. I settled on just saying that I can print 100 square inches per mL to make the math easy and err on the side of heavier use.
Anyway... the cost of ink is usually the much smaller value when compared to the cost of paper anyway. Sure the ink in the smaller p600 isn't as cost effective as with the bigger 300ml carts (and dare I say that the canon's don't clog nearly as much or have to waste ink switching blacks... teee heee... have to brag here), but the paper cost is still the higher cost.
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The only problem is that this number varies greatly based on image content. I print with a Canon iPF6400 and the software gives me a pretty precise amount of ink used. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it gives me ink used all the way down to 1/1000th of a mL. (ie. 0.000mL). I can see a huge difference between dark and light images and would say this number easily varies by at least a factor of 2. I just did this analysis and found that I can get anywhere from 160 square inches per mL of ink down to only 90 (this isn't quite 2 to 1 mind you) for dark images. I settled on just saying that I can print 100 square inches per mL to make the math easy and err on the side of heavier use.
Anyway... the cost of ink is usually the much smaller value when compared to the cost of paper anyway. Sure the ink in the smaller p600 isn't as cost effective as with the bigger 300ml carts (and dare I say that the canon's don't clog nearly as much or have to waste ink switching blacks... teee heee... have to brag here), but the paper cost is still the higher cost.
Yes this is correct - I had already covered that issue in one of my previous ink cost estimating exercises - see Figure 23 of my Epson 4900 review https://luminous-landscape.com/the-epson-4900-printer-hands-on-and-down-to-work/. The way around this problem is to wait until you have a large enough representative sample of your output from which to produce a valid representative average of ink consumption across a reasonably large number of prints with varied content.
And you are correct that for the large format printers using large ink containers, the cost of ink per photo is way less than the cost of high quality paper. For smaller cartridges the cost of ink would become a larger fraction of the total.
For Canon the approach to clog management is different; the print head has spare nozzles and the heads are consumables, so the flip side of the cleaning cycles we experience with Epson, is print head replacement for Canon, and they cost about $500 each. I have no idea how many sq. ft. of coverage the average Canon head is good for, but if any one does, a factor that should be weighed into a rigorous comparison of printing costs.
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My experience with epson4900 and 9900 is about 1ml per A4 size print. Varies between 0.6 and 1.3ml
That is with full coveren images no line drains or so.
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That is with full coveren images no line drains or so.
JR: Do you mean here borderless printing - the actual image covers 100% of the size of the A4 sheet?
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For Canon the approach to clog management is different; the print head has spare nozzles and the heads are consumables, so the flip side of the cleaning cycles we experience with Epson, is print head replacement for Canon, and they cost about $500 each. I have no idea how many sq. ft. of coverage the average Canon head is good for, but if any one does, a factor that should be weighed into a rigorous comparison of printing costs.
The numbers that I've come across are.... 4 Litres of ink or 35,000 square feet. Now, if its 4 litres of ink, does this mean per color channel? I have no idea. If so, this would mean roughly 30 of the 130ml carts. But if the head is only good for 4 litres total, across 6 color channels, then this would mean only 5 carts for each color, and I'm sure this isn't the case. In terms of the square footage number, this would mean roughly 5,800 24x36 prints, which is quite a bit.
Anyway, the other way to look at it is this. With either printer, you get 1 year warranty. When the head goes on an Epson, I've read it costs $2000 for the part and service. When you head go on the Canon, lets just call it $1000 for the two. But the nice thing is that these new heads have a warranty for 1 year, so if they fail before the one year, they will be replaced for free. Even if they fail after the one year mark and you have to buy 2 new heads again and spend another $1000, this gives you another year of warranty. In my mind, it just seems like better bang for the buck. Plus of course there are no issues with switching blacks and all the associated air problems with that.
Anyway, this thread isn't about the bigger printers so sorry for the distraction. :)
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The difference in weight of the cartridges before and after the initial priming of the printer, should give an accurate enough estimate of the ink used for priming. The ink is aqueous and pretty close to 1 g = 1 ml. It is actually a little less dense than water, but close enough.
Anyhow, Red River does ink use estimates for a large number of smaller format printers, including the p600
http://www.redrivercatalog.com/epson-surecolor-p600-cost-per-print.html
... form which it would appear a p600 13" x 19" print using PK would cost about 9% more than the same print on the Epson r3000.
Does the p600 not have the Printer Watcher Utility that the 3880 has? For the 3880 it will produce CSV files showing ink uses for each logged print for each color to the nearest 0.1 ml. It does not, however, include cleaning cycle waste.
Brian A
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The difference in weight of the cartridges before and after the initial priming of the printer, should give an accurate enough estimate of the ink used for priming.
Brian A
Once the ink leaves the cartridges for the priming operation, part of it goes into the waste tank and a larger part remains in the lines and dampers for making prints, and given the size of the lines it is a lot of ink capable of making many prints. Unless you know the split between the two you don't know the extent of inaccuracy of your priming estimate if you are trying to derive net available ink for printing.
Anyhow, on first reading, the Red River Methodology looks OK, but I am surprised by how high their ink cost turned out for a 13*19 print. This means, apart from any other factors, that the cost of the ink per ml is higher than for the 4900, which is to be expected given the much smaller size of the cartridges. My costing model for the Epson 4900 indicates CAD 1.66 (including taxes) worth of ink for an average borderless 13*19 inch coverage, or about half the Red River calculation for the P600. This CAD 1.66 would be about USD 1.32 with taxes or USD 1.17 without taxes. (We have a 13% HST rate in Ontario.)
(Edited to clarify I am quoting costs here for the 4900)
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This means, apart from any other factors, that the cost of the ink per ml is higher than for the 4900, which is to be expected given the much smaller size of the cartridges. My costing model indicates CAD 1.66 (including taxes) worth of ink for an average borderless 13*19 inch coverage, or about half the Red River calculation for the P600. This CAD 1.66 would be about USD 1.32 with taxes or USD 1.17 without taxes. (We have a 13% HST rate in Ontario.)
Wow.. this is rather surprising. If I was to do this calculation, for an iPF6400, I'm getting about 90 square inches per mL at the heavy end, or about 160 square inches per mL on the light end. A 13 x 19 print is 247 square inches, so this translates to as bad as 2.7 mL for a dark image, or 1.5 mL for a light image. Assuming a 300mL cart is $212 with taxes, that comes out to 71 cents per mL. Therefore, this is about $1.07 or $1.92 of ink, or of course somewhere in between. Ok... this isn't surprising at all now that I run the numbers. :)
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I mean a picture printed on A4 with 3mm borders.
Not a line drawing or similar with only a small portion not white.
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I mean a picture printed on A4 with 3mm borders.
Not a line drawing or similar with only a small portion not white.
Ah, OK; in that case my costing model for the 4900 reproduces your ink usage estimate for that print size very closely.
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... a larger part remains in the lines and dampers for making prints, and given the size of the lines it is a lot of ink capable of making many prints.
That ink is gone. It is going to be in the lines when you toss the printer. It doesn't matter whether it is in the waste tank or the feed lines, that volume of ink is gone. It doesn't figure into the calculation. The printer stops printing and requests a new cartridge based on cartridge ink levels.
Brian A
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That ink is gone. It is going to be in the lines when you toss the printer.
Brian A
That's irrelevant - tossing the printer happens perhaps years after you will made the calculations. Anyhow, I've contributed all I can on this topic and I am now signing out of it.
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Ah, OK; in that case my costing model for the 4900 reproduces your ink usage estimate for that print size very closely.
Yes indeed, i did sort of the same thing you did in your review. Kept a log of ink usage per print and after 30 or so the pattern was quite clear.
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Just a point re. the usability issues in the PC Magazine review re. handling fine art papers. I was also experiencing numerous, frustrating paper skew errors until I discovered its possible to turn the Paper Skew Check off in the Set Up Menu. No problems now :)
Simon
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Yes indeed, i did sort of the same thing you did in your review. Kept a log of ink usage per print and after 30 or so the pattern was quite clear.
This is good - confirms that with a properly stratified, representative sample of one's output, a sample size of about 30 or so prints is sufficient to provide a reliable estimate with which to portray future ink usage.