Another pet peeve of mine – printer manufacturers that make printers that will only accept their OVERPRICED “genuine” ink cartridges.  I have an Epson Artisan 837 printer.  It’s a nice printer.  I had the Epson Artisan 800 before this, and it worked well.  I was able to buy cheap cloned ink for that printer, and while it whined every now and then about the ink cartridges not being genuine, it used them and they worked well for the most part.

It’s bad enough that this error has to pop up in the middle of printing a document that is ALL BLACK AND WHITE, so it shouldn’t need any MAGENTA ink:

Replace cartridge

Now, with the 837, it appears Epson decided to get a lot more strict about the ink cartridges they accept?!?  I put in one of the clone ink cartridges, and I get the following message:

Unrecognized

I picked Epson because their ink cartridges are not nearly as expensive as HP and others, but to simply reject clone ink because they want to sell their own is stupid.  Now I have to run off to Staples to buy some magenta ink just so I can finish printing my black and white document!