Does the 5300 waste ink?
Amongst other things, to welcome this product on the market Epson took the opportunity to have a study done by a German lab on the 5300‘s ecological aspects. As we could have guessed, because this was the subject of the study, the result was merciless. In an office document test, it showed that Canon and Epson separate cartridge printers consumed 80% of their ink, compared to only 40% for the Kodak. So this means a waste of 60% in the 5300!
We had to carry out an autonomy test based on the new ISO reference document. The color cartridge was emptied after an honorable score of 415 pages, which was an even better result considering this included all colors except the black for office prints and only costs 15 Euros. In the previous page, we saw that the cost per page was a mere 6 cents and 30% less than the most economical previous separate cartridge printers.
A new cartridge weighs 116 grams (thank you Théo).
The empty cartridge we removed after the test in ISO document autonomy weighed 96 grams, which means that 20 g of ink was consumed.
As we see in the video, we tried to extract what was left in the cartridge, at least 31 grams and probably a little more because we didn’t count the photo stabilizer (the white well).
However just based on these figures, this already means that the 5300 used 20 grams of ink from a total of around 51 grams for all colors in the cartridge. Only 39% was consumed and 61% remained in the wells when it was supposed to be empty. This is indeed what Epson said.
This is indeed the risk if you just print text and if you don’t print any photos, the photo black ink and stabilizer are not used at all. The EasyShare could have been the most economical printer - it isn’t in ink - and we recommend recycling the cartridges in stores that offer this service.
