Color Printers: Ripoff of the Century

I recently bought an Epson color printer for a hundred bucks and I really got the shaft. I made the mistake of trying to actually USE my printer last night and realized why I hardly ever do that. First of all, digital pictures are great and the software to touch them up is also great. Printing those pictures, however, is a nightmare. The software that came with my camera stinks. It does nothing more than organize the pictures with proprietary indexing crap that I don’t need. It doesn’t allow cropping or redeye reduction, which I do need. The software that came with my Epson printer is even worse. It allows me to update the picture contrast, remove redeye, and crop, but I can’t save the changes and can only send the updated picture directly to the printer. Of course, I don’t ever want to send anything to the printer because it absolutely drinks ink and since it costs sixty dollars to replace the ink cartridges, it just doesn’t make sense. You may wonder why I said “anything” in that last sentence, but get this: Epson modified this printer so I can’t select ‘greyscale’ as a color option. That’s right, it’s all color, all the time so I have to replace six ten dollar ink cartridges instead of one ten dollar cartridge. At that cost, it’s much cheaper to just dump the pictures to a disk and stop by Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Rite-Aid, or any of a hundred other establishments, and have them printed for about twenty cents apiece. Combine that with the corporate policy of Epson, Canon, and Hewlet Packard that dictates that all models be so flimsy they break within one year of purchase, and you’re virtually assured of spending a hundred and fifty dollars a year on your printer whether you use it or not.