Printers occupy a strange position in the technology world. To be honest, not much is expected of them in a technological sense. While innovations are claimed printers tend to make use of very retrograde technology that actually makes life a lot more difficult than it needs to be. There are many examples of where even connecting to a wireless printer is needlessly complicated. One might assume, for instance, that the printer would simply have something like a WEP key and anyone with that WEP key and the relevant password would be able to send documents to the printer, but things are often not that simple with no good reason why. This extends more obviously to ink cartridges. There are many printer companies who produce ink cartridges that waste a significant amount of ink because a certain level has been reached. This is despite there clearly being enough ink to carry on printing a significant number of pages.
This is on top of the products themselves being a bad investment for consumers. Epson ink cartridges are very expensive meaning that customers often have no alternative to fork out the best part of £50 just in order to print. Epson printer ink is of an undeniably good quality, but for how long will consumers idly accept the inflated prices of what is essentially just some ink? Of course Epson laser printers use toner, but that too is incredibly expensive. This is why many companies have chosen to create compatible ink that either re-uses empty ink cartridges or use a cartridge that the specific printer can accept. They are often 1/3 the price of the original, resulting in a huge saving for the consumer with no hit in quality. Ultimately, it isn’t very hard to get ink wrong as long as you find a reputable source.