Epson's latest printers save money by letting you supply ink from pouches. We are used to buying milk in pouches. Now get set to do likewise, the next time you want to top up your inkjet printer!
Epson, the people who brought tank-based inkjet printers to the consumer market four years ago, have taken the next logical step—increased the tank refills to litre-sized Replaceable Ink Pack Systems (RIPS), for two of their high-end, all-in-one multifunction printers.
This brings the economies of scale to business printers since the pouches that can be attached to the tanks, come with 1 litre of black or 750 ml of cyan, magenta and yellow ink. Epson was savvy enough to understand that consumers wanted the freedom to print, without having to worry about high ink costs and the inconvenience of replacing cartridges all the time. RIPS is the result. The pouches feed into the printer via proprietary connectors.
The Epson Workforce RIPS printers provide enough ink to print up to 75,000 A4 pages of black and colour—enough for years of uninterrupted printing in a business environment without having to change cartridges. In addition, they promise the lowest print cost in this category: 30 paise for B&W and 75 paise for colour.
There are two models on offer. While the WF-R8591 is an A3-sized wireless multi function machine, the cheapest RIPS printer is the WF-R5691 at Rs.98,999: an A4 sized print-scan-copy machine that is Wi-Fi ready for wireless printing.
Churning our 20 or 30 pages per minute in colour or monochrome, these inkjets seem positioned to challenge laser printers in similar business use cases. As a popular two-wheeler ad catch-line used to say: Fill it, forget it!
