Floyd L. Davidson
Eric Stevens <eric.stevens@sum.co.nz>wrote:

Eric Stevens
On Tue, 03 Dec 2013 19:47:52 -0500, PeterN <peter.newnospam@verizon.net>wrote:

So it seems that the 4900 is the same as the other printers: some ink is used to give the printer it's initial charge.

PeterN
Nope. The 4900 comes with more ink than the others. For me this is EOD.

Eric Stevens
EOD or not, you have missed the point. There is no argument that the 4900 has bigger cartridges. I was trying to say that as in the 2800 and 38xx, some of the initial load of ink goes into filling (also known as priming or charging) the system. You never get a full load of ink out of the initial cartridges.

Floyd L. Davidson
Peter hasn't missed the point, but he isn't getting it across to you.

Of course there is a significant amount of ink used to simply charge the system when it is new. And of course all printers come with a set of ink cartridges.

The point is that most printers come with a special set of ink carts that have only about twice as much ink as is required to charge the system. After it is initialized the cartridges will be about half empty. That might be only 40 or 50 ml for some printers that normally use 220ml carts!

What Peter is trying to tell you (and I have not verified that this is true) is that to his understanding the Epson 4900 brand new is supplied with a set of full sized 200ml carts, and after the system in initialized the first time it has something greater than 150ml of ink per cart. That is a total of 11 carts, with 1650ml of useable ink that would normally cost you about $825.

Note that the Espon 4880 came with 8 each 110ml carts, and half of that was used to charge the system. The extra ink was worth about $200.

What you get with an Epson 2880, that uses 11.4ml carts, is a pitance that has no significance at all.