Reviews Written by CR in O.C. SoCal

Solid Printer with Ink Hostage Situation

Pros: prints in black really well; great scanning options

Cons: creates 'printing' hostage situation when color inks run out

In general this is a very good printer and scanner. It would be great except for its failings tied to the color inks. You pay a price (quite literally) for the color option with this printer and possibly most other Epson's too - read on.
1)To start, once the color ink cartridges run dry the printer won't print anything else until they've been replaced. Doesn't matter if the black ink is recent/full and you have your print settings set to print text only and/or black only, you are stuck until new color ink cartridges are installed - all three of them. So there goes roughly $35+/- each go-round of forced consumerism.
2)Then, even if you are 'stingy' with using color printing the printer will eventually flag the color ink cartridges as "too old" (at about 6-month-ish) and force you to replace them. This is actually listed in the user's manual, and I experienced it first-hand!
3) A good thing is that the black ink cartridges have a relatively high-capacity version available (68's) so you're not swapping out black cartridges too often. But now here's the big HOWEVER; amazingly enough there is no comparable high-capacity version for the three color inks, so gee whiz they need changing often. Kind of like selling you a car with great gas mileage, except that the oil has to be changed every 200 miles or the car will shut down.
I'll hang on to this printer for a while, but this color ink piracy will have me seriously considering switching to HP next time - unless Epson changes their evil-ways on this issue. You can be sure that my next purchase will not include a color printer that sets up a 'replacement' hostage situation between the color and black ink cartridges. ...