The "Individual Ink Cartridge" Myth

We heard them all -- inkjet printer manufacturers nowadays tout all the advantages of their printers having individual cartridges giving you an substantial savings as you no longer have to replace all the colours at a go regardless of whether all the colours of the inks have depleted. So, unlike the days of old where if you run out of say, magenta, you'd have to replace the entire cartridge consisting of anything from 3-6 colours, you now only have to buy and replace magenta.

I used to have the now defunct Epson Stylus Photo 890 which uses a black cartridge and a "all-in-one" colour cartridge and had always been skeptical of the "individual ink cartridge" advantage as Epson's Status Monitor software would always show me that the levels of the inks would always deplete at around the same rate.

Now I am using a Epson Stylus Photo R210 with INKdividual (Epson's clever marketing term for this feature) Ink Cartridges, I noticed it depletes at around the same rate as well, giving me confirmation of my earlier skepticism. So in the end, I probably have to spend S$110 replacing all the 6 cartridges simultaneously instead of less than half of that using the combined cartridges.

I guess the concept of having individual cartridges is probably more for people who print a lot of business graphics and presentations where large areas of a single colour are the norm. But for the people out there who uses this printer for what it's meant for (i.e. printing photos) then perhaps the concept is not so applicable (unless of coz, you print lots of photos consisting of large areas of a single colour like green grass and blue skies).

The only advantage then, of this whole concept is that since each individual cartridge is obviously of a larger capacity than the combined one, you get to print a more before having to replace the cartridges (albeit all of them).