What's wrong with the 6 cartridges? The Epson 960 (the step UP from the 900) has 6.

Saw that printer at Office Max and at Compusa Sunday for $159. Plan to pick one up myself.
Randy

I dunno, if the cartridges were like $5 it might be worth it, but $12 for 1 color of ink, I can get a new 6-color cartridge for $20. That is the one thing I always look at before buying a new printer is what the ink will cost me. If I have to replace all the cartridges once in my 900 it will cost me around $40, if I had to replace them in that printer it would cost me $84, that's twice as much, and not getting any real benefit from having the 6 seperate cartridges unless all the jobs I print consist of 1 or 2 colors which rarely happens, and even if it does it still needs to use a mix of colors so it wouldn't really use that much more of one color than another.

I was pringint a job last night (canon Printer with Seperate tubs). One cartridge of magenta only lasted 15 pictures. The others remained full. I would have hated to buy tri color cartridges just because red ran out.

>What's wrong with the 6 cartridges?

Agreed. The more the better, as it saves on ink: when one color runs out, you don't need to replace all the others.

A bit more info in case its not well known. I'm a couple of years behind the times of the latest models from Epson and HP, but I believe this info is still correct:

You buy an HP if you want the most reliable printer. You buy from Epson if you want the best quality print. The HP ink cartridge includes the print head, so when it clogs you throw it away. The Epson print head is permanent and prone to clogging. When it clogs you're in trouble. I've resorted to forcing boiling distilled water through the head via syringe, but once you have a problem it always comes back. The solution to Epson print head clogging is to keep printing: Don't let the printer sit unused for a month.

(My Epson printer is the only thing I ever got with a Best Buy warrantee. Didn't need it...the darn thing started clogging in its 3rd year, not its 2nd :-)

P.S. I'm not knocking Epson. My next printer will also be an Epson - the quality is just so good its worth the risk.

You must have your ink saturation set at 500% if you are only getting 15 CD's from 1 ink cartridge. I printed probably 50 Full color DVD's, and about 300 Text and Logo DVD's with my Epson 900 before I had to change the ink. Looks to me like the ink tanks must be smaller for this printer also if you have to change them after 15 prints. And yeas I have read all the comments that people say the more seperate ink tanks you have the better, I am just not buying it. Between home and work I print probably 200,000 - 500,000 CD's and DVD's a year so I guess I just have more experience than most of the people here when it comes to printer hype and what is good and what isn't.

" I can get a new 6-color cartridge for $20"

Thats pretty good. Where are you getting them at that price? Are they Epson or OEM?

-Jason

They are Epson Cartridges, I usually just search around online when I need some and I normally find them for around $20. There is always a sale going on somewhere. Ebay, Amazon, Buy to name a few.

After printing thousands of disk labels and DVD/CD liners with our trusty Epson C80, I have to admit I have mixed feelings about separate ink tanks. Going in to the C80 purchase I assumed the 4 tanks were a giant leap forward because you could replace just one color when it ran out. The concept appealed to my sense of thriftyness and economy.

I have come to realize that there are several flaws in the logic:

(1) If you're doing a large job that uses a lot of just one color, the separate tanks make excellent sense. However, most jobs aren't like that. After months of use, I noted with surprise how all the tanks dropped at about the same rate.

(2) If you run a tank to the end (the C80 is pretty smart at knowing how much ink is left), the printer will stop printing and demand that the tank be changed. Fine. But the problem is that when you change that tank, the printer will then proceed to charge itself by priming all four tanks. In other words, every time you change one tank, you lose maybe 3-4% of each tank's ink just getting the printer to print from each nozzle cleanly.

(3) If you change one tank and a second tank is down to 5% or so, better change it also. Why? Because you will often need to do an ink charging after you've changed the tank, and the printer won't let you do that charging if a different cartridge is getting low.

(4) Finally, keep in mind that these ink cartriges have a shelf life. You can't keep them in the printer indefinitely. So you'll be changing all the cartriges about once a year anyway.

So what seemed to me at first to be a slam-dunk step forward now looks like a mixed blessing. However, the C80 is a GREAT printer, and I love the pigment inks--they are smear-proof, waterproof, and fade-proof.

I have four Epson printers and the only one that I really like is the 1500. Its fast as grease lightning and fairly resonable on ink and prints fabulous pictures on glossy paper at 13 x 19. I have the 960 which is for DVD/CD printing only and the cost of the ink is more than the 1500. My solution is to try to use the ink cartridges from the 3000 (1" x 6" x 6") or a 55 gallon drum. I haven't figured out how to do this yet so will just keep spending money for ink cartridges. They have us by the you know what. I also have the first color printer they came out with in 1995 still running.

JJK

I was curious about this: "[...] I love the pigment inks--they are smear-proof, waterproof, and fade-proof. "

I have an Epson 960. It does a good job on photo paper, but I bought it mostly for printing CDs and DVDs. I use MAM-A (formerly Mitsui) and also Maxel brand white inkjet-printable DVD media. I like the printer overall, but the contrast, color quality and saturation on the DVDs is worse than on any kind of paper, even plain paper, and the image on the DVD will smear under a damp finger no matter how long it has dried. I've even tried a Krylon acrylic overcoat spray, with unsatisfactory results (could not get a uniform coat; smelled bad, looked bad, and only modest increase in smudge resistance). I worry this may be true of any inkjet on a DVD, since the 960 image printed on normal paper will not smudge after it has dried.

So is the C80 any better? Will Epson's new "ultrachrome" pigment inks be any better (eg. Epson 2100, or R800 due out in USA Feb. 2004 ?)

I'm not sure what type ink is used in my Primera Signature4 uses but it dries in about 30 seconds. I have run soap and water over these discs with out any smearing or smudging. But the colors will get lighter. And it uses very little ink.

>You buy an HP if you want the most reliable printer. You buy from Epson if you want the best quality print.

Actually in the past year or so, Canon has become a serious contender in the photo inkjet market. I love my i950, which I got earlier this year (Canon now sells the even better and less expensive i960). The resolution is astounding, it's whisper-quiet, each color has its own cartridge, and it's very fast (borderless 4x6 photo in under a minute).

I print tons of family photos with it very inexpensively. I generally use Epson Photo Paper (a decent glossy), available from Costco in a pack of 120 for $20, which is quite a bargain. Plus I refill my own cartridges using ink and refillable cartridges from inkjetgoodies.com (no connection, just a satisfied customer). The print quality with the inkjetgoodies ink is just as good as the OEM stuff, and refilling one cartridge amounts to about $1 in ink, versus $11 or so for a new cartridge.

MitchK

I use the Verbatim discs with the 960 with default settings and have no problem with smearing or drying.

JJK

HP printers stink. I've had three, and all of them developed paper feed problems. Plus, the inherent style leaves a "roll" in the paper.

This is indirectly related to the topic but if you guys are looking for a good source for VERY good deals on ink, try carrotink.com. I started buying from them and the prices are fantastic.

Jbeale:

A few years back I had a job that involved calling on the HP printer division. It became obvious pretty quickly that ink technology is a very, very complex subject for the HP guys. As I understood it, the idea was that pigment inks were the Holy Grail in that they were fadeproof and waterproof. The problem was that it was extremely difficult to do yellow, cyan, and magenta pigment inks for HP printers, because of a host of reasons. I gathered it basically boiled (ha!) down to a couple of issues. First, the HP printers worked by heating a very tiny resistor in the ink chamber wall very rapidly. The ink next to the resistor would "boil" and the increase in pressure would cause a droplet to be ejected (this is in contrast to the Epson method, where a piezo crystal would flex suddenly, causing the pressure increase). The problem was that these temperature swings put additional constraints on the chemical composition of the ink. The second problem with pigments is that they tended to block the very tiny nozzles.

Anyway, I recall that HP used pigment black but dye colors. Epson's C80 somehow did the impossible by introducing pigment colors in addition to black. I note with dismay, however, that Epson has since brought out additional ink lines for the replacement C82 and now C84. I have no idea how those inks are different.

So my conclusion is that I don't know enough any more to form any conclusion. If printer X works on medium Y, great. It seems to me that this would be a great topic for PC World or PC Magazine to cover--an in-depth analysis of the various ways to put artwork on DVDs.

The main problem with the CD and DVD printing is that most inks are designed for paper, the printing surface of most printable cd's and dvd's is made from mostly clay (that's what our distributor told me) So if you find your printer prints great on paper you can't really expect it to look great on a CD or DVD unless they have paper labels. We get into this with clients all the time, they bring in their artwork printed out on a nice sheet of glossy photo paper and it looks great, we then print them a proof on a CD and they say this doesn't look right the colors don't match perfectly, it's not glossy. they just don't understand that what surface you're printing on can really effect the final product. The best way to get a good match is to find the printer and media that will give you the best quality and color matching.

Having been doing this for 3 years now and having printed thousands of discs and trying every printer and media out there we have found that the best Cd's for printing are from Taiyo Yuden they make nice silver and white inkjet printable CD's and the best ones for DVD's are either Verbatim or Maxell. We use them exclusively with the Primera Signature Pro Printers and have had great results. The only problem we run into occasionally is with clients that have "corporate colors" they have a set RGB value that the color has to match, in most cases we can come very close but rarely have we been able to match it perfectly.

Got the R300 a couple of weeks ago to finish a project in time for Christmas.

It did a good job printing a photo montage on Verbatim printable DVDs, made easy using the included software CD/DVD template. Ink dried in under a minute and looks great.

It also did a nice job with the case sleeve inserts involving a photo montage, text and graphics printed on HP semi-gloss paper.

The printer is smarter than I am, as it wouldn't let me waste ink printing the wrong side of the HP paper when I had one of the sheets in the wrong way.

Oh yeah, it also prints very nice high rez glossy color photographs on Epson Premium Glossy.

JL