When I look at the service manual I think I see that the waste ink pads are removable from the bottom making them more serviceable even to the end user. I'll have to double check into this.
There's something about the waste ink pad I find at odds wirh my own experience with the first Epson Claria based printers. After using an RX580 for 3+ years on a daily basis, the top of the waste ink pad tank is not even discolored. The principal reason I think is because I rarely have to perform head cleanings at all. ( BTW, on the RX580, three screws on the top, and 4 tabs and you're next to the waste ink tank. Another 2 screws holding a bracket and you have the waste ink tank and it is a container/tank open on the top. Two screws holding the tank and you've got the waste ink tank out. All directly from the top. Take the tank out and wash and dry if needed.) On the Artisan series, clogging further appears less of an issue. So based on this the requirement, less waste ink tank capacity might be warranted based on normal use. However, if the end user uses aftermarket sponge cartridges, or gets air into the system or tries to prime refillable cartridges or CISS via head cleans, the counter is going to run up quickly via the amount of head cleans. This will make the flashing lights appear quickly. I also have a strong hunch that the waste ink pad programming is also time based. This means that if a lot of cleaning is done in a short period, the lights will appear sooner than if the same amount of head cleanings is done over a long period. I have not verified this. The other thing is I always leave my printers on standby. Yeah, I know it contibutes to global warming but that practice has worked for me.
On normal printers that sit directly above the heads, swapping cartridges is practical. On the Artisan the length of tubes internally is going to require a lot of ink to swap. This also means a lot of head cleaning or at least 100 pages of printing to clear the previous inks from all the channels. Been down that road.
Pharmacist, despite profiling I find various shades of cast as I rotate the paper from different angles. I think it is an artifact of the color matrix of each pixel that Epson engineers chose. Even with OEM inks and Epson papers, a cast is often reported. I suspect the new Artisan color engine uses a different matrix. I have not tested this on the Artisan yet. (Profiles are different from the 1400) and maybe the engineers addressed this issue. Now the other issue regarding B&W is that different colors fade at different rates. With the extremely delicate balance of colors that B&W requires, you can bet this balance will be upset easily over time as each color fades at differing rates. I've pretty much given up on color ink and black and white. If I want B&W, then I simply pop in some Carbon based inks that I made up and take it from there. The blacks are so much deeper and the impact of B&W on matte is spectacular. The tones are so much richer and better graduated. I'm still working on B&W inksets for Canon CMYK printers like the iP4500 etc.
