Inkjet Considerations

I had been using HP printers for years, mostly because I got an employee discount on them. I think I had maybe 4 or 5 over the last 15-20 years. These were usually inexpensive models, marketed on the "razor blade" theory - give away the printer at little margin and make money on the ink.

I usually used third party ink, which was MUCH cheaper than HP inks, although I still have one printer that I subscribed to HPs Instant Ink program for cartridges. It gets little use and often sits idle for long periods, so that approach made some sense. Every month they bill me $1.90 and when the printer runs low, it phones home and they send me new cartridges. So I figure I am doing a little better than break even.

One of my older cartridge printers, an HP PhotoSmart, started jamming frequently and the only way to save it was to rip it apart and recondition the rollers. I did not want the hassle, so started looking at alternatives, plus it had already outlived its useful life - I think I had it for about 10 years.

Many years ago I had an inexpensive Epson inkjet that did a decent job with text and photos. I think it ended up with gunked-up printheads, so I replaced it with an HP.

I was intrigued with the idea of tank printers, which can print for years and thousands of pages (occasional home use, of course) on one fill up of the reservoirs. The choices boil down to HP, Epson, Canon, and Brother. There may be others, but those are the biggies.

Tank printers cost more, since the physical device no longer fits the razor blade model of leveraging frequent ink cartidge replacements. The cheapest I could find sits around $200. The main feature I wanted was duplexing, which drives the price point a little higher.

After reading reviews, I settled on Epson. They had recently - 2025 - released a new series of 3 "EcoTank" inkjets targeting the home office market. Reviewers noted that the three printers had the identical print mechanism; the primary differences were speed and document handling features like auto feed for the scanner/copier.

I pulled the trigger on the least expensive, the ET-2980 at $229. It came with a full set of ink bottles (unlike some printers where you get a limited starter set). The main drawback of this model is that you load the sheet feeder in the rear. Since I have the printer inside a cabinet, loading paper is a little awkward. But it holds ~100 sheets, so no big deal.

My only other criticism is that the LCD display is tiny - I wish it was larger. Kind of surprising since these days displays are cheap. Even my old HPs had good sized displays. Sort of a moot point since you rarely need to look at it.

Setup was very easy and print quality is excellent. I did have to install the Epson drivers on our MacBooks to get full functionality. Happily, Epson still supports older versions of MacOS - in my case Big Sur on an old MacBook Pro. Many software vendors (e.g.Microsoft, Adobe) will no longer allow their software to work with Big Sur, which is really annoying.

There is also a decent smartphone app that can display status and control the printer and also a good manual (online PDF).

One thing I was not initially clear on is that you can remotely close the output tray if you wish. I thought it had to be manually pushed in. As it is, I just leave it open. I think this is mainly a cosmetic feature if you have the printer on your desktop and want it to look tidy and take up less space. It will open automatically when it get receives a print job. Pretty slick.

The Tank Problem

The big issue with tank printers is you have to use them. If they sit idle for long periods of time, the printhead and the tubing can clog. Purging and cleaning can help, but not always, so you can end up with a brick.

Since we are often away for months, I needed a way to periodically print a page with all the colors. This requires a computer of some sort to be active all the time - not always practical. Windows computers go to sleep unless you tell them not to, which results if a lot of power consumption.

Fortunately, I have a little ARM box running Armbian for my music server. I leave this box on all the time and it only uses a few watts of power. I set up a cron job to print one test page weekly. To do this, I had to install CUPS (Common UNIX Print System). I then had to configure the printer in CUPS using the web interface. I could not find the exact model listed (too new), but used an older Epson model that has the same protocol as the current models, and that worked. CUPS includes a PDF test page that uses all 3 colors plus black. I then created a cron job with an lp print command pointing to the test page and set it to activate once a week.

CRON is a bit fiddly and one of those arcane UNIX utilities that is non-obvious to set up correctly (unless you are an accomplished UNIX admin). But there is plenty of online help and even most AIs can guide you.

My hope is that even with extended periods of not actively using the printer, the ink system stays clog-free.

So far, the printer has been installed for about 2 months and the weekly test pages are working fine.