Printer Buying Calculus

I’ve very enjoyed the process of printing and have spammed the walls of my workplace with prints:

Recently, I’ve had request for prints, and have also wanted to start printing bigger so I looked into a new printer and found that the Epson 4900 is $1000 off of $2500.  This is the largest coupon I’ve ever seen and after spending hours looking for the strings attached to it and checking to see if there was a newer printer queued to replace it I found a blog post somewhere that said “They do this sometimes to dick with HP”.  Sounds reasonable.

The Epson 4900 is a massive printer with a paper cartridge designed for 17″ x 22″ paper and ink cartridges big enough to store the fluids from exsanguinating a horse.  It has 11 ink catridges including two for colors I think Epson  invented (yurple and bleen).  Best of all, the cost per print was cheaper so I did the math on how many prints I’d have to make to break even.  The answer: 1700 13″ x 19″s.  At my current rate of printing, that’d only take 19 years.

On its way.