The ink situation with home printers is out of control. Anyone who has ever thought it was a good idea to produce their own Christmas cards will be familiar with the panic I have experienced when you get halfway through printing them out, only to have to replace a cartridge because you're out of cyan. Whatever that is.
Of course, you don't have a replacement cartridge because you only changed it last week when you were trying to run off that personalised calendar featuring photos of your holiday. In fact, for some reason that used up TWO cartridges... and it was only 12 pages long.
These stupid things aren't cheap either. In fact, due to loss-leading specials and other cash-back offers, in many cases it's actually become cheaper to replace the whole printer than one of the cartridges.
Not only does that seem to defy the laws of economics, but throwing out an entire printer once a month can't be great for the environment - or the capacity of your wheelie bin for that matter.
There has to be another way, and it turns out Epson is leading it...
As satisfying as it may be to hurl your existing printer out of a 2nd storey window next time a cartridge runs out mid-calendar, if what Epson claims it's latest range of EcoTank printers can do is true, your empty cartridge outrage may be at an end.
As the name implies, the key to the EcoTank is the little compartment you can see to the right of the L565 pictured above. It contains 4 separate tanks which feed the print head directly. Basically, that means you can bung a lot more ink in your printer.
In fact, Epson says you get 2 years worth straight out of the box. Yes, you read that right; not 2 weeks or 2 months, but 2 YEARS.
I decided to put this outrageous suggestion to the ultimate test; the dreaded SCHOOL SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT - but we'll come to that shortly.
First, there IS a little bit of setting up to do with these printers, but it's not as scary as you might think.
I won't go into the usual driver installation and Wi-Fi connection because that was all fairly straight-forward and went pretty much according to plan. It's probably worth noting though, all 3 of Epson's EcoTank printers, the L365, the L455 and the L565 are Wi-Fi capable and I had no problem connecting to a variety of devices, including iPads, Android phones and Windows PCs.
At first glance, having to fill the 4 tanks manually does seem a little daunting - like superglue, printer ink has always had an unnerving ability to find its way into places and onto surfaces you never expected or wanted it to go.
Epson has certainly done its best to make the process as foolproof as possible. The bottles containing the ink have nozzles specifically designed to rest at the top of their tanks so you can fill to the brim without accidentally dipping into anything you shouldn't. Then everything's sealed up with rubber stoppers and safely tucked away. For 2 years.
Make no mistake; You WILL end up with ink on your fingers. I consider myself reasonably tech savvy. I'm not afraid of opening things up, taking them apart and putting them back together again. But no matter how hard I tried, I still couldn't empty the contents of the supplied ink bottles into their respective reservoirs without spilling some on my digits.
Oh, I got better at it as I went along and like most operations of this nature, it's a confidence thing. I started with the black ink and because I was a bit nervous about squirting indelible darkness all over myself and the printer, that's almost exactly what happened. My advice to anyone else carrying out this procedure is to have a tissue/cloth handy, to tip the bottle up and into the tank quickly and even more importantly, remove it and set it right-side-up just as quickly. Any hesitation, and you'll end up with black, yellow, red and blue fingertips like I did. Surgical gloves may be the answer... or maybe you just need to be slightly less of a klutz than me.
The printer then runs an automated priming process which mysteriously takes up to 20 minutes. For me it was less and apparently that's only when you first take the printer out of the box. There's no priming involved next time you fill up.
The good news though; in theory, that should be it for the next 2 years. What's more, when a colour DOES run out, you only have to replace that one, not all 3 colours as you do with most colour cartridges. At just $20 a bottle, this is starting to make a lot of economic sense.
But can it really go the distance? Remember that science fair project I mentioned? I let my 11 year-old have her way with the L565, and it just kept going. There were photos, there were title boards, there were pages of (somewhat questionable)results. The trusty Epson just kept printing, When she accidentally cut the top off one page and she was about to try and glue it back together, I simply said, "Don't be silly. Just print another one."
Pretty crazy, right?
Given the project was due in the next day and we were still working on it at 9:20pm, I'm sure glad the L565 lived up to its reputation. No breakdowns. No empty ink tanks. No stress. It just kept going.
Since then I've been printing with gay abandon. The 14 year-old needs her piano music photocopied for her competition? Not a problem. Even when Dad is too useless to line up the pages properly, thereby missing off all the key signatures, no biggie - we'll just copy them again.
Obviously we won't really know if it'll go the full 24 months until this time in 2017, but by then I'LL probably be obsolete, let alone the printer.
One thing's for certain. A little plastic bottle takes up a lot less space in my bin (and ultimately our landfills) than an entire inkjet printer and that's got to be a good thing.
