Epson Stylus C65

2013 and still running – This printer is great. I bought it in 2004 - 2005. I never cleaned it neither oiled it, I am cleaning it today. It lies about the usage of the ink, but if you have a cartidge reseter you can have double ink for each one. If you have a continious ink system you can print cheaper that any other printer technology. Still works! It will be expensive if you buy the original ink and ignore about other cheaper methods of geting some.

Cheap to buy, Expensive to run – This printer is not in the market anymore, but I'm sort of reflecting in general that, all Epson inkjet printers are cheap to buy, but expensive to run. This is perhaps the same comment for all inkjet printers in the market which they are sold below cost, but earn the money from the ink in the future. Epson's selling point here is that they have individual color ink cartridge but other brand use single tri-color ink cartridge, which Epson claims to to be cheaper because not all color are use up at the same time. The fact is, for individual ink to work, there is a tube connecting the ink and the print head, the problem is every time you start the printer, it will pump the ink to make sure the ink is at the tip of the print head in order to guarantee the print quality. By doing this, a small amount of ink will be pump out.

The second problem is that when you change cartridge, it will also have to pump the ink to fill up the tube, this will also pump out the same amount of ink from the other old cartridges, so from time to time, if your printing usage is not high, you will end up with more ink in the waste collection inside the printer than in your prints.

In addition, there is also a waste collection counter, which, when the printer "thinks" that waste ink collection is full, the printer will stop, and guess what, to replace the waste bin and reset the printer, it will cost more than buying a new one.

So in today's standard, it will be a lot cheaper to use laser or LED printer for long run, although the initial purchase price is high. Pretty good printing quality with low pricce Ink is expensive, and waste a lot in changing cartridge and power up of printer