It's been a strange couple of months with the latest Epson printers, or with printers in general to be honest.

With ghoulish stories about credit crunch, free falling stocks and absolutely nothing about environmentally friendly printing or high costs of consumables as printer manufacturers desperately try to tie you in to their new cartridge and chip design it's no wonder that the two new offerings from Epson have taken something of a backseat.

For those who've not been aware of this segment of the market, the B300 and B500DN printers from Epson have been designed to take on the HP Officejet monster inkjets which have dominated the cheap, fast, business orientated market for some time.

Epson have spent so much time concentrating on the home user and the pro-printer market it's surprising that they didn't spot this rather large market wedge until now. Quite possibly they kept convincing themselves that companies were happy to spent £15 a cartridge for 15-20ml of ink and change them every day but as HP and colour lasers have gained more ground I think they finally woke up and smelled the stale coffee.

Do I have one of these printers to review? Unfortunately not, but what I do have is a few things you should consider before you leap into bed with Epsons new baby.

1. The B300/B500DN use the same Durabrite inks that have been in use since the days of the now venerable C86 so they tend to dry out and clog quickly in dry air conditioned environments (ie: the office) so lots of use will be required to keep them running. Also waste ink is likely to be quite high for cleaning routines to avoid such clogging.
   
   
2. The consumables include a waste ink "Maintenance Kit" which is basically a removable waste tank instead of the built in nappy pad arrangement common for 99% of other inkjets (about time Epson!). Not too costly either so this is good news.
   
   
3. Ignore the alleged page speeds. One review laughingly worked out that the only way to get the rated 30+ pages per minute was to print 1 line of black text per page in draft mode! As always, reduce the marketing quoted speed to a third and deduct 2 to get a more accurate figure
   
   
4. Paper feed is going to be one to watch... HP have no end of problems with their paper feed system designs so if Epson have a better, simpler approach that works it'll be one that has people taking an interest!
   
   
5. Consumables & original unit cost. Amazingly it seems Epson have finally listened in part to the oft repeated complaint that printers should cost more, and consumables cost less. You'll be able to spend a whopping £350 on a B500DN but the cartridges are coming in around the £42 mark for 198ml High Capacity cartridge but that's in black only. The Colours are all at 100ml or lower but still cost around £35 each despite the 50% capacity of XL beasty. Nice touch!... Still it's going to be cheaper than the 20ml @ £12+ approach of old. Perhaps Epson have woken up.
   
   
6. Finally, because it's a new printer it has a new chip and the printer manufacturers are now very keen to "protect" their customers (not their profits, honest folks!) from poor quality inks so expect the new chip to take some months to break before any 3rd party inks appear.

All in all, I'll be interested to see how the reality matches up to the marketing hype (albeit low key as it is) and what problems people start experiencing.

Interesting times ahead.

UPDATE (13th January 2010)

In case you were not aware of this, it seems that Epson have limited the B300 to the standard and high capacity cartridges. You cannot use the XL capacity cartridges with this printer at all thanks to the firmware refusing to recognise or use them.

This is not due to a technical limitation such as the size of the cartridge but a purely business one where Epson want to force you to either use the more expensive (per ml) cartridges on your B300 or to buy the B500DN.

To call this shortsighted is putting it mildly.