Printing blues

I wanted to title this post as "Epson sucks" initially, but changed my mind, because, all things considered, I am pretty much satisfied with my printer.

All the cartridges in my Stylus CX4500 ran out of ink (more on that later). Since I don't do much of colour printing, I thought I would buy only a black cartridge. But when I fixed the new cartridge, the printer still refused to print. After a phone call to the customer help line, I learned that:

1. Epson printing technology is different; you need all cartridges even if you are only printing black and white documents.


2. You may think that you are not using up the ink in your colour cartridges, but if you print more than 15 pages per minute of black and white stuff, the colour ink gets used too (black is, after all, a mixture of all colours -- or is it white? Never mind).

Bottom line is, I have to shell out an additional 1125 bucks.