There are a lot of wrong information being dispensed.
I know math is hard but it is sometimes necessary. I have tried to lead horses to the water but some won't drink.
Some printers have maintenance boxes that are available at very reasonable cost.
For example a Pro-1000 maintenance box costs $14.99 USD.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1192445-REG/canon_0628c002_mc_20_maintenance_cartridge.html
A set of chips costs $144USD plus shipping in NA.
You can obtain aftermarket ink for the Pro-1000 at $12 per 82ml plus a recommendation of 4 key OEM colors to maintain the performance to 90+ % and also to obtain better performance over 35 custom ICC profiles to match up.
You can also get a Pro-1000 that actually costs nearly the same as a Pro-300 once you factor the ink in. However a Pro-1000 is NOT for casual users. So that is not the point.
The key thing to understand is that even if you waste more ink. ( And the pro-1000 will NOT automatically purge because a tank was removed and refilled) You need to waste a ton of ink at $12 per tank and waste a LOT of maintenance boxes before you see the economic balance shift. There is actually a lot of conjecture here going on without controlled experiments and I will show this in the future in a planned podcast with charts etc.
I have already demonstrated this in the Epson XP15000. This machines comes with a replaceable maintenance tank for $10USD. I tested the amount of ink that is wasted on a cartridge change and purge. So each time the lid is open and closed and the tank touched, it uses 2.4ml on ink. Other than that normal timings control the purge. A maintenance tank holds about 80ml of ink. Calculate the amount of openings you need to perform before the tanks are filled. Contrast that to the OEM setup of round robbin,. Shocked you are! IF YOU KNOW MATH.
The other thing is that ARC chips do not help at all or can be worse than overriding. Why because with ARC you can never stop the round robbin forced cycles. If you override and fill ALL at the same time, It is highly likely that you will actually save MORE ink than even using OEM tanks not reset and definitely more than an ARC setup.
The only downside are with printers that have no replaceable ink pads. Again however, if one chooses to stick with OEM tank and chips, you are forced into the round robbin, Contrast this against the overriding aspect and topping off all. The other downside is that protection of thermal printheads is SOLELY up to the user.
So for a printer like a Pro-10, your OEM setup will force 10 purge cycles before a cycle of tank switches are finished. If you override and fill ALL at the same time, just how much extra will you use. 10 purges over say 2 extra purges to make sure in an override setup? It is easy to see the picture. How many extra printers can you purchase with the savings! Again, do the math.
I have been carefully experimenting and considering the aspects in a more engineering fashion all this year in anticipation of the coming paradigm shifts that have arrived and while useage patterns may change balances, the conclusion is that is may not be as BAD as you might think.
Certainly, if you are able to obtain a resetter, DO SO. However in the future it might not be as bad as some think once proper analysis, measurements and calculations are done. But math is required and some simulation and modelling is required. That is the hard part because some are unable. A similar situation exists with Finance and the general population many are unable to figure it out for their own circumstances.
