Okay, we have a correction to yesterday’s post. It appears our crack research staff (the person writing this) misunderstood the results of Epson’s recent study on wasted printer ink. Here is what the results really said.

Epson utilizes a the multi ink cartridge, individual ink tank approach in all of their printers. This means that each individual color (black, cyan, magenta, yellow, and in some cases other colors) each come in their own cartridge. When one runs out you simply have to replace that specific ink cartridge and not all. Most Epson printers use 4 different ink cartridges, some use up to 6 or 8.

Companies such as HP, Lexmark, and Dell utilize a different model. They offer a two cartridge model. One of the cartridges is for the black ink and the other contains the 3 color inks. Some of their printers use a photo ink cartridge. These cartridges contain the same color inks, but in a photo grade formulation. Put shortly, you will never have more than 2 cartridges in any of these printers at one time. When one of the colors in the color cartridge runs out of ink you need to replace the entire cartridge, no matter how much of the other two colors are left.

This being the case, the study by Epson is really not all that impressive. They wanted to find out which model produced more wasted ink, their individual ink tank model, or the competition’s 2 cartridge model. They showed that their model produces less waste than the other model. Common sense tells you that if you only have to replace the cartridge that is empty you will produce less waste than if you have to replace all three colors. All this study does is allow Epson to make an data backed claim that their method is better than the competition’s (which is what we would really want anyway, right?).

So, here we are with results that back our hypothesis and a study commissioned by the company that runs their entire printer division based on this hypothesis. Some may call it tainted science, we’ll call it “confirmed”. Let Pacific Ink know what you think.

Sorry for the mistake.