Executive Summary:
The system prints beautiful pics, indistinguishable to my eye from the original Epson carts. The documentation is an absolute joke. Truly, wretchedly, awful. Tech support is very friendly, only available via email, insufficiently responsive (if I was a professional studio that had been down waiting on their help, I would have climbed a building with a rifle), and not particularly useful, ignoring several questions that were asked multiple times in multiple emails.

Long Version:

Epson has been running a $150 rebate special on their R1900 printer. Coupled with easily-findable 10% discount codes, I ended up getting it for $350. It will do 13" wide roll sheets (though I use 13"x19" mostly). Anyway, gorgeous prints, great printer.

Of course, the down side is 8 ink cartridges (yellow, magenta, matte black, red, orange, photo black, gloss optimizer and cyan). Epson wants $13 each (assuming you buy at least 3), so a full refresh is $115 by the time it's at your door. And the matte black gets used twice as fast, so really, it's about $130 each time you cycle through a set. Makes the $350 printer suddenly seem like not-so-good-a-deal.

Currently, there are no aftermarket cartridges. When there are (sometime in December, allegedly), they'll be a little over $5 each, making a refresh a much more affordable $50. But that's December, maybe.

The only other alternative is InkRepublic.Com's continuous ink system. It's $250 shipped, and each bottle holds around 5 Epson carts full of ink. And the bottles cost about the same as a new Epson cart ($14). This makes a full refresh of bottles (including an extra matte black) around $140 shipped, working out to the equivalent of $28 per full cart refresh.

So the math's attractive. But how does it work?

I ordered it, everything showed up fine. I include labels on these because god knows, you can't be sure what some of them are based on the documentation. Here's what it looked like as unpacked, a parts breakdown, and a look at the connected hosing assemblies.







The electronic documentation they sent was for a different printer than mine. The printed "documentation" around the R1900 is a 2-page insert that includes poorly photocopied pictures that measure out to an expansive 15/16" x 3/4" each. Yes, less than a 1-inch picture, in badly copied black and white. After an email exchange with customer service, they sent me a word document with the R1900 installation information. Except for the spots where it wasn't about the R1900. And the spots where they carefully tell you what to do with every model *but* the R1900. And the spots where they tell you to make sure the ink is installed on the correct side of the printer according to the printer model, and then never tell you which side it should go on for which model. Or the dozens of spots where they use an undefined term, or just plain use the *wrong* term (calling some foam plugs 'washers' for instance). Or the fact that the two-page printed instruction shows a "bridge" from a different printer. I spent 3 days thinking I was missing a part until the word doc showed up.

The word doc *did* have bigger pictures. Unfortunately, they shot all of the pictures zoomed in insanely close. This means that for several things, I have no clue what part of the printer they're showing. It's like the zoomed-in pics of an elephant's skin -- you have no idea what you're looking at. I'm still not sure what tab I have to pry off to install the waste ink tube, and they're not answering email about it, so for the moment, I hope there's not a ton of waste ink...

The bottle tops are supposed to match the inks. They don't. I labeled *everything*. The bottle tops, the clamps, and the carts. It still didn't stop me from switching two carts when I was installing the ink -- but fortunately I noticed it before anything was printed.

So the first tricky bit of assembly is putting in the chipsets. The printed docs were useless for this, but when I finally got the Word file, it had some great pics in it. Be prepared to seat and unseat a few times until you get them lined up perfectly (after each attempt, you power the printer on and see if the ink lights are all out). It took me 3 tries. The little printed circuit strips on the top each have a tiny switch on them that you hold down to reset the chips should the printer decide that it's out of ink.




After that, thinks are pretty straightforward. You attach the "bridge" piece, route the tubing, make sure the printhead moves well, then begin filling the ink. You do this by squeezing all the air out of the vacuum bottle, and sucking the ink out of the bottom of the cart until all of the air is out of the tubing and the cart is full. While maintaining this suction, you then clamp off the hose, then install the cart. Once they're all installed (make sure you don't put them in the wrong slot like I did), you unclamp it and it's ready to print.

Then you put the cart cover on that they give you -- that doesn't latch. Sigh.

Then you figure out by "washer" they mean the foam plugs, wedge one into the cover latch so it will print with the top open. I'm supposed to have installed the ink overflow bottle next, but I can't figure out how to open the side of the printer (there's a very unhelpful picture in the docs).

A couple of nozzle cleaning cycles, and I just printed out 20 pages of cardstock. And I don't feel like I'm burning dollar bills as I do it... Assuming that it continues to work with no problems, I'm loving the quality. It's a shame the install experience was so painful.

Looks like a great printer, I hope the system does work out for you. Does their sight have support boards? I think your pics and instructions might help someone else in your position.

Installing the CIS has always been a huge bar to purchasing them to me. At least this one didn't want you to drill holes through the printer sides. I still think I'd have to have it installed for me before I'd buy one. But I can get after market cartridges cheap. 2 whole sets of color and 4 black cartridges for only $40 so I'm good for now.

Are you running inks or pigments through your system, as the R1900 is able to run pigments. Using pigments is slightly more but the end produce is water fast and fade resist - almost to the level of laserjet.


I have been looking into this style of system for a little while esp. when doing draft runs and scaling test prints.

Great review which has confirmed my thoughts of paying the chap the extra $50 to install it for me.




Lord Abaddon of Wormwood