Printing key legends for Voyager (equivalent) calculators uses up black ink quickly!

[brouhaha]

My old HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 (B-size color inkjet using expensive cartridges) recently decided that it no longer has a printhead. I looked inside and still see a printhead. HP sells replacement printheads, but they cost very nearly as much as the printer. Also, the failure could be cabling or the logic board, so I'm not about to buy an expensive printhead that might not even fix the problem. I guess the 7740 will be going to recycling, which likely means it will get shipped to China and dumped by the side of the road (the fate of most e-waste "recycling"). HP has a new model that's basically equivalent to the 7740, the OfficeJet Pro 9730e, but I won't be buying one because of how much HP's ink cartridge schenanigans piss me off.

I need an inkjet because I print on things like vinyl that one can't run through a laser printer. (Well, I suppse one could, if one didn't mind damaging the printer and not getting usable output.)

I want B size because I print schematic diagrams and PCB layouts.

To replace the 7740, I got a factory refurbished Epson Ecotank ET-3850. It's not B size, but it uses very inexpensive bottles of ink: $20 black rated for typical 7500 pages, and $40 set of three colors rated for typical 6000 pages. On an equivalent page basis, the genuine Epson T502 black pigment ink costs about 9% of what the genuine HP 936XL black cartridge costs, and the genuine Epson T502 C/M/Y color dye inks cost about 6% of what the genuine HP 936 color cartridges cost.

I notice that even HP is now offering a few tank printers. This is obviously a response to the competitive threat from other vendors, but it must be a bitter pill for HP to swallow, after being able to gouge for ink for so long. If they do it the way Epson does, it also eliminates their ability to DRM the hell out of supplies. (DRM = Defective By Design.) I only used genuine HP cartridges, but the DRM still caused me a lot of grief and wasted money when the printer decided the cartridges were unusable even though they still contained plenty of ink.

The ET-3850 lists for $399, and can usually be found for $319, but Epson sells the factory refurbished units for $150 with free shipping. (I won't buy refurbished stuff other than factory refurbished, because most other parties' idea of refurbished is "we dusted it off and put it into a box".)

I was a bit worried about whether filling the printer's ink tanks from bottles would be messy, but the system is well designed, and if you follow the instructions, which are pretty simple, there's no mess. When you plug the ink bottle onto the tank, it goes "glug glug glug", letting ink into the tank, until the tank is full. When I did this there was still some ink left in each bottle. On first use, the printer has to go through a charging process which pulls ink through the plumbing into the printhead. That takes about ten minutes, and by the time it was done, the levels of the ink tanks had gone down a little, so I was able to put the remaining ink from the bottles into the tanks.

Anyhow, I got it just in time, as I am printing and cutting inserts for relegendable keycaps for Coconut and Voyager equivalent calculators, which use a black background. Printing a vinyl sheet with three sets of Voyager keycaps at "high quality" results in a noticeable drop in the black ink level of the printer. I've decided that "normal quality", which uses less ink, is satisfactory, and in fact better in some regards.

I'm also having better results with my Silhouette Cameo 4 cutter now. A year ago, I was seeing vertical registration errors, very minor at the top of the page, but progressively worse toward the bottom. I didn't have time to figure out the problem before the conference last year, and worked around it, and didn't get back to it until now. I assumed that it was either:

1) I did something stupid generating the cut file
2) The printable vinyl slips when the cutter's feed rollers move it

#2 seemed unlikely since the printable vinyl is actually a Silhouette product, so of course it turned out to be #1. The page bottom registration mark in my file had an incorrect y coordinate, so the cutter was actually doing what it was supposed to, which is finding the registration mark, and compensating for what severe dimensional error of the printer output, but really just my own dumbitude.

Aside from not handling B-size (and Epson makes a more expensive Ecotank printer that does), the only drawbacks I've found of the ET-3850 compared to the HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 are:

1) The 7740 has an optical sensor to automate printer alignment, while the Epson prints a series of test patterns and asks you to enter the number of the pattern in each group that is aligned best. As long as you don't bang the printer around a lot, you should only need to align it once, or very rarely.

2) The 7740 paper trays are removable, while the ET-3850 tray is not. I would have liked to buy extra trays to keep alternative media (such as printable vinyl) ready for use, just by swapping the trays.

Overall, I think the ET-3850 would be a good deal at its normal pricing, and is an exception deal at the factory-refurbished price. If you don't need to print on special media, a laser printer is usually a better choice, even if it's a little more expensive up front.