In a car, you generally know that you have X number of miles to get yourself to a gas station before you wind up calling AAA. Some printers, on the other hand, have this tendency of just stopping dead in their tracks while there's still plenty of ink in reserve.

A new study commissioned by Epson (grain of salt time) confirms what many of us suspected; inkjet cartridges generally get tossed out when there is still plenty of ink left. It turns out that those cartridges are quite literally little black boxes that are keeping consumers in the dark.

And not only is it a waste of money, but it looks like good ink is getting tossed out in alarming quantities

Ars Technica has the scoop:

They studied the efficiency of both single and multi-ink cartridges. Espon's printers were among the highest rated, at more than 80 percent efficiency using single-ink cartridges. Kodak's EasyShare 5300 was panned as the worst printer tested, wasting 64 percent of its ink in tests. TÜV Rheinland measured cartridge weights before and after use, stopping use when printers reported that they were out of ink.

Gah! 64 percent wasted anything is just plain wrong.

[via Boing Boing]