Hope this helps:

Epson Settlement

Wow, I hadn't heard about this lawsuit before.

On first glance, it appears that Epson was sued because someone thought it was wrong or unfair that they would make a printer that would stop printing when a cartridge was nearly empty, even though there was still ink left in the cartridge.

If so, then I think this is a bogus suit. To my knowledge, the Epson printers do not actually monitor the level of the ink in the tanks; instead, they use a method of actually counting the drops fired from the cartridge, and then stop printing when a particular number is reached.

Critics might say that Epson is artificially profiting from such an approach, because there is still ink left in the tank. I don't think that's a fair argument. I suspect that Epson designed the cartridges around a given life (looking at the competition and figuring out where they wanted to place themselves on a cost-per-page matrix) and then just loaded that amount of ink, plus a bit more to ensure that it never ran dry. I do know that running dry can cause all sorts of issues for the inkjet heads, and it could be that the pigment ink used in many of the Epson models would create serious, perhaps unfixable, issues if left to run completely dry. Or, if I were one of the design engineers, I might argue that this "cutoff" approach would ensure that every print coming from the printer would be guaranteed to look as good as it could possibly look , knowing that color balance would never be an issue because printing would not be allowed with a nearly-dry tank.

The cynic in me tends to conclude that this is yet another example of the American class-action legal system run amok. I will not be surprised at all to see that the attorneys leading this case making many millions of dollars in the settlement--which is fair, by the way, if the suit has merit and they can document some huge number of work hours. But so far I don't see the merit of this case.

Incidentally, Epson printers generally have one of the lowest ink cost-per-page numbers among the major brands. I've had maybe a half-dozen Epson printers over the years, and our household currently has 4 Epsons, an HP, and a Canon.