How much ink does the Epson 3800 use?
According to early tests, about 2 mL of ink per square foot when printing at 1440 dpi and about 2.2 mL of ink per square foot when printing at 2880 dpi. Printing at 2880 dpi uses roughly 10% more ink than printing at 1440 dpi (not twice as much, as incorrectly suggested elsewhere on the web). The numbers are above are total ink consumption over all cartridges (e.g., 2 mL overall, not 2 mL per cartridge). Keep in mind that these numbers only cover the amount of ink used for the print itself. (This is what the printer and driver report.) Note that ink is also used for other tasks, such as nozzle checks, head alignment, nozzle cleaning, etc. Mark D. Segal has written an article about 3800 ink costs. Mark finds that ink overhead (i.e., ink used for maintenance and other non-printing tasks) is about 20% of ink used for prints. To quote directly from the article, “Hence on average, the cost of ink for a print should be multiplied by about 1.2 to take account of losses.
