Guys, share your experience please! I'm printing my pictures on Epson T50. Really like this device. But I don't know what to do with the high price on original cartridges!? Do you print at home or in copy centers? What is more cheaper? recently... i found this video Epson CISS vs original cartridges. I don't know, but it seems to be true. And now I'm thinking about own good small printer. Nevertheless, I am afraid to use non-original cartridges. What can you say?
I can't help with the cartridges but I would recommend using a website such as www.photobox.co.uk for your image printing. They are very quick amd cheap, it just be cheaper than printing at home!
It depends what level of control and quality you want to achieve in your photos. I print a lot of my images at home on an A3+ printer, but for the quality it's difficult to match the price of home printing at this size as I also use profiles to prepare the files for printing, which many of the cheap labs don't offer. Profiles give you complete control over the printing process so that you know almost exactly how the image will look when it's printed and my print files are quite different to the web files (but, when printed, look pretty close). With a good quality art paper, it's about £5 per print at A3 size, including ink and paper to print at home, whereas it'll cost me closer to £12 + delivery for the same sized print on the same paper at the professional lab I use. There's a high barrier of entry for A3 printing - it's a £400+ investment in the printer for starters - but I only have to print 57 A3 prints for the printer to pay for itself in savings on lab costs. The economies of scale are even better at A4 - I don't have the numbers to hand - but it actually made complete sense for me to do the majority of my printing at home. Of course, super-sized prints still need to be done at the lab but that's not going to change for quite some time - it's not financially viable for me to invest in a 22in or larger format printer at the moment as the majority of my prints are smaller sizes anyway.
I have a T50 with CISS, The quality of the prints is on par with the original Epson carts. total cost to replace all inks is about £70 but thats for 250ml of each ink so its much more cost effective. The downside is that its massively temperamental if its not used on a regular basis, you will void any warranty not only because you'll be using non original parts but you have to remove part of the cartridge holder to get the system to fit. Mine still throws up cartridge empty errors when it thinks the cart is empty when in reality its never empty (this might have improved since i bought mine but its worth mentioning)
