Peter Figen
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Upload & Sell: On
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Dan,
Epson can't ship your printer with ink in it fully charged, so they give you a full set of 110ml cartridges and it takes about half of them to fully charge the ink tubes. You'll use a chunk of the rest running tests and getting up to speed. That's part of the cost of ownership, but it will quickly be offset by the much lower cost of larger roll papers, and when you graduate to the 220 ml cartridges (as you should), ink costs less than half of what you're used to paying with the 2200.
You're going to see the printer LCD panel recommend that you do a Power Cleaning on a fairly regular basis. Unless you are having head clog problems, don't do that Power Cleaning, as it uses a fair amount of ink. Do, however, run nozzle checks every time you are going to print, and get in the habit of opening up the front of the printer, sliding the head unit to the left and wiping any drips of ink that might be hanging off the small vertical wiper blade. That alone will save you many problems throughout the life of the printer.
I have heard of people having problems using ink carts that are too far out of date. Slight color shifts, which could drive you nuts. Epson says for installed carts you should use them up within six months.
I'm not exactly sure how much a black ink swap costs, but I've heard somewhere between $60 and $100. That seems about right to me. I try to do it only a couple of times a year, when I've got a lot of the other type to print. Also, try and time it, if you can, either when your other carts are full or when they are so close to empty, you'll have to replace them anyway. The printer won't let you change carts if there's not enough ink in all carts to accomplish the changeover. This is an area where you end up losing some ink once in a while. Don't forget to have extra maintenance tank or two, as when you need to replace them, it's the last thing you think to have spares.
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It did ask if I wanted to do a power purge (hell no!) but did a little whir and click and that was it. Printed perfectly. *whew* I have to add a little bit of info - the two carts it said were empty? Yup - near as I can tell without cutting them open they were dry as a bone. Waaaaay better than my R1800 which always irritates me by making sloshing noises on "empty" carts that sound suspiciously like "Nyah nyah - this is costing you! Love Epson".