The 900’s purchase price is not what you would describe as budget, as many printers these days are 3700 rupees (in the UK) BUT the running costs are very low, and over time you will find that the savings you make from the inks will offset the cost of ownership.
The printer is around a shade over 14, 000 rupees and is a business workhorse. Epson benchmarks are 12ppm mono and 11.5ppm colour, quite zippy printing figures.
It also has the smallest inkjet dot size of 3 picolitres and gives very impressive results on glossy photo paper at 1440 dpi x 720 dpi (considering this is not a 6 ink colour printer!) Print speeds are impressive especially in normal 360dpi mode where it just spits out those sheets.
Connection wise it can hook up to a PC using a parallel or a USB port and to a Mac using a Mac serial or USB port. The printer is larger than most and needs the appropriate space. There is the novel option of a software postscript RIP for graphic designers out there and it can also be networked, handy for the office environment.
Coming back to the printing inks, the inkjet cartridges are bigger than most and contain more ink, epson quoted figures 1200 pages for the mono cartridge and 570 pages for the colour - contrast that to a budget printer such as the epson 660 it only manages 540 pages in black and 300 in colour.
So you can see the 900 can print about twice the amount of pages, and the cartridges are almost the same price meaning that the print costs for the 900 are ’almost’ half of those for an epson 660 or 440, 460, 640, 750, and 1200.
Third party compatible cartridges are available for the 900 at 225 rupees for black and 292 rupees for colour, this combined with it’s large print capacity makes copious amounts of inkjet printing affordable for the masses with absolutely no sacrifice, - with high quality, high speed 1440dpi and 3 picolitre printing.