I bought my first Color Inkjet printer from Epson 9 years ago. Its cost was equivalent to about $165 at that time in India. My heart skipped a beat or two when I noticed that in the Printer Software that displayed the ink level, the color ink level came to almost half after taking a couple of family photos in print! The drain of black cartridge too was equally fantastic! I gave strict orders to my children against taking any unnecessary color prints saying "Let us preserve the ink for some really needy situation in future".

But slowly and steadily, without taking any color prints, the ink level kept on reducing only to find one morning that the color cartridge become bone dry! Reason? The printer, by default, undergoes a cartridge-cleaning cycle whenever switched on (and before taking a print). Whether you take a print in black only or otherwise, both the cartridges undergo a cleaning regimen automatically and each cleaning eats away some amount of ink!

The black cartridge too went bankrupt within 2/3 months (despite my very limited usage) and the new Original replacement from Epson cost about 16 dollar-equivalent rupees. I did not even have the courage to ask the price of the color cartridge! Work out the consumable cost to printer cost ratio: 1:10 ! I was carried away by strict warnings of Epson about the dangers of using cheaper alternatives initially. But beyond 2/3 replacements, I understood that the printer was a black-hole. I switched over to Korean equivalents costing $6 and over a period of time, the price dropped to $4.

The surprising fact was that some brands of the equivalents at times gave a much better print quality and also more number of prints!

After I pulled along with Epson for 3 years, it (fortunately!) developed some serious snags. I bought a new HP Deskjet printer. The printer cost was about 100 dollars! (See the drop in prices of printers : from 160$ to 100$ over a period of 3 years).

This was definitely a better bargain than Epson printer from the point of view of ink consumption. The useless drainage of ink by uncontrollable idle cleaning was not there.

But the lacuna here was that the ink storage capacity of the Cartridge was much less. The cartridge hardly gave 200 pages of Black prints and a few tens of pages of color prints.

HP was much more vociferous in insisting on Original cartridges. I received regular news letter from HP on this matter. First two times I bought original black cartridges from

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