Epson has commenced High Court proceedings against Dynamic Cassette International (DCI), in relation to an alleged infringement of its print cartridge patents.
 
It is the latest in a very long line of lawsuits Epson has initiated against various manufacturers which produce third party cartridges for its printers.
 
Epson claims DCI's own brand Jet Tec cartridges and others produced for retailers are in infringement of patents. 

Robert Clark, Executive Director of Epson Europe, said: “We invest heavily in research and development to ensure that our customers receive the best possible imaging results from our products. Attempts to copy our technologies impact both on us as a brand and on our customers’ experiences. As a business we are committed to protecting our investments, and our resulting products and technologies, the world over.”

Compatible Ink, do you really get what you pay for?

Date Published : 28-12-2010

 

We have been seeing & hearing a lot of reference to the volume of ink that is advertised on compatible cartridges. For example, we have seen "Double Capacity" or "High Capacity" stamped all over other companies cartridges, this is all well and good but does it mean anything?

Now, let’s take the Epson T0711 cartridge as our main example, we are all too much aware that the genuine inks are never as full as they possibly can be, but, as for most things in life, it is like that for a very good reason! If a printer draws more ink out of a cartridge than is physically there, the only thing that can take its place is air, common sense really. The problem is that a printer doesn’t print very well using air, so I guess as a customer you'd be pretty annoyed that your printer keeps pounding away, drawing air into the print head and printing nothing, great for if you're doing a 100 page document and it runs out half way through! Once air is in the print head, the only way to get it out is to put some fresh ink in at the top and purge it through, great if you want to use 30% of your ink cartridge just to get it printing again! All seems a bit daft to me.

So, we are back to the lesser of two evils, you will run out of ink regardless, since you will be using the product for its main purpose of printing instead of on inbox tray of sorts (more on that another time). So it seems only common sense that the printer notifies you of low ink before the event, allowing you to change the cartridge, use minimal ink in the process of changing cartridge as you haven’t drawn air into the system, and let you merrily carry on printing with minimal fuss.

Now for some technical stuff, a standard genuine Epson T0711 contains 7.4ml of black ink (i've verified with Epson) and the amount of ink consumed by the printer is reported to the little chip on the cartridge. Now the only way a compatible cartridge will work in a Epson printer, is if it 'masquerades' as a genuine cartridge and in doing that, the printer will always think that the cartridge has 7.4ml of ink inside it, regardless, so is there really any point to putting more ink inside?

So now you're asking "Why do compatible inks offer more ink?" answer is, it’s a selling point, nothing more, the printer will never use all the ink inside an 19ml black cartridge, it will spit the cartridge back out when IT thinks its spent, if a genuine ink cartridge holds 7.4ml of ink, then the printer will run the 'change cartridge' process before it gets to this level to prevent the air lock problem outlined above, self-preservation in essence.

In all, the answer to the question is yes of course you get what you pay for, the ink is cheap but don't be fooled into thinking you can use it all!

 

If you have any questions relating to this article, please send you're questions or comments to sales@simply-ink.co.uk