Epson R265 ink consumption

Since I had to run a print job on a R265 anyway I thought I could collect some ink consumption numbers at the same time. It's with a R265 equipped with a CISS, running pigment inks at this time, and the print job comprises 180 pages on glossy foto paper, prints are 2 images on one A4 sheet, borderless, arbitrary content from a recent shooting of a dance show. I placed the ink tanks of the CISS on a scale, and the waste ink is collected into an external bottle. So I have here some numbers you (n)ever wanted to know.

The R265 runs on 6 inks, and was the first photo printer model of a sequence of succeeding models like the R285, P50, and the 1400, and 1500W A3 units, and a L800 model with an Epson CISS. All use the same or a similar printhead with 90 nozzles per color, 6 color total . I'm not familiar with the Epson model names in the American sales regions - those Artisans xx etc

A first cleaning test shows that a manually initiated cleaning cycle via the driver consumes 6 gr of ink per cycle, I'm measuring in grams , that's what the scale shows me, the ml volume numbers would be almost the same - 5% less, the specific weight of ink is listed as 1.05 in various MSDS's, so for the sake of simplicity you may consider 1 gr of ink as about 1ml .

It is easily possible to read the number of cleaning cycles with the report function of the WICReset utility which separately counts them as the manually started cleaning cycles and those triggered by firmware.

These printer models use the T080x cartridges , I found information that they contain 7.4 ml of ink, but I don't know whether that's a gross or net number. Pricing of OEM cartridges runs at about 135€/100ml up to 195€/ml, about 10 - 15 € per cartridge. This means that one cleaning cycle with OEM cartridges would cost you about 10€/$ or more - glad to be refilling in light of this pricing.

I printed 180 pages, the scale shows me an ink consumption of 168 gr, all inks combined, and the waste ink bottle filled up to 33 gr, and the firmware reports 7 cleaning cycles from (virtual) cartridge changes.

That makes 135 gr net of ink for actual printing, or 0.75 gr per page, or 168 gr gross makes 0.93 gr per page eff. The printer made 7 cleaning cycles, and accidentally several cartridges were resetted at the same time, up to 5. The worst case would be that a reset/cleaning cycle would be started for every cartridge at different times up to doubling the numer of cleaning/reset cycles . I have seen that before - one cartridge got a reset and cleaned, then the next one, and this for 4 or 5 colors after each other, each cleaning cycle got the ink counter of the next cartridge to the low condition, and since there is only one cleaning unit for all colors ink is always sucked from the other cartridges as well. Such scenario could bring the ink consumption up to a level of 1.1 gr per page.
The R265 comes with 6x90 nozzles, other models have many more nozzles and some more colors, I'm not aware of their ink consumption for the cleaning cycles but I would not expect that they are lower than on this R265. All this shows that 25% and more of the total ink goes down the drain, and most likely more with those printers with more colors and nozzles.
That's where the benefit of the L800/1800 and other Epson Ecotank models come in - they don't use cartridges but ink reservoirs, and their firmware does not start any of these cleaning cycles linked with a cartridge reset resulting in significant savings with such an Ecotank printer.
I measured 33 gr waste ink, stemming from 7 cleaning cycles, that makes 4.7 gr per cleaning cycle, less than the amount measured for a cleaning cycle started from the driver - 6 gr total. So the cleaning cycles for these conditions are different, it's probably a different timing for the pump sucking the ink.

( I'm not just printing patches for fade tests , I keep my printers as well busy with other jobs....)

its about 1,1ml per fullbleed 100% ink covering on a borderless A4 sheet glossy paper

I read too that typical 6ink Epson uses 1ml for A4 page.

as long as you print with 5€/litre dye ink the cost of the 25 - 35% waste ink of the total ink used does not matter, but I'm running now the L800 with the Fujifilm DL ink or similar at 150€/litre, and then the waste ink which does not get created in the first place counts much more. I'm not expecting that cost benefit to pay for the higher price of an L800 over the P50 it is based on, but there is another handling benefit with the L800, I was printing those 180 pages from above double sided on 90 sheets of paper, and the R265 stopped 3 times in the middle of a page to tell me that one carrtidge is empy. That is a lost page - more waste ink not accounted for and a lost sheet of photopaper, and that required additional handling to keep the page sequence for the double sided print, and a reprint of 2 double sided sheets - more ink which gets avoided with an L800, I can print any sequence of pages without that additional handling on the L800. The same would apply to the L1800, but that model is totally overpriced as an A3 printer.

Yes the L1800 is totally overpriced as an A3 printer. But why get A4 when one can get A3? You can always print smaller format with it too. And no this does not mean a wide format printer can print great on small format media.