There is no catch, if you define a catch is something you learn after you've paid for the product.
But at first I was so skeptical that I went down to the local stationery supplier to price a bottle of ink for the Epson EcoTank before purchasing the printer. It really was $14 for bottle rated at 6K pages. The print nozzles were guaranteed not to dry out if unused for 2 years - and the printer came with a 3 year warranty so I guess that's real.
I owned a Brother Colour laser before this. It was a lovely printer. It cost the same as the EcoTank and was a bit faster, but a set of genuine toner cartridges cost almost as much as the printer. And the inkjet is lighter, smaller and uses far less power.
The only down side is Epson's Linux drivers truly suck. They looked to provide source but it turns out that's just the front end - the rendering engine is shipped as pre-built libraries that get linked in at the end. And of course those libraries get SIGSEGV's, yielding only a bank page. Looking for the reason is how I found out there was no source for them. The scanner software their download centre offers didn't work at all. When I chased that down I found it was open source, provided presumably for free by kind person from Norway and Seiko rebranded it and made it available in their download section for my printer. That kind person did list the hardware it worked with, and my printer wasn't in the list so I don't know why Seiko put it there. Finally the PWG/Raster protocol, aka cups internal raster format, aka "cups driverless", aka cloud print didn't work at all. Way to go, Epson.
What did work is CUP's native escpr drivers. So I can print, and even with these old drivers the colour quality is better than the laser. So I'm happy. But brickbats to Seiko/Epson for their godawful software nonetheless.
But at first I was so skeptical that I went down to the local stationery supplier to price a bottle of ink for the Epson EcoTank before purchasing the printer. It really was $14 for bottle rated at 6K pages. The print nozzles were guaranteed not to dry out if unused for 2 years - and the printer came with a 3 year warranty so I guess that's real.
I owned a Brother Colour laser before this. It was a lovely printer. It cost the same as the EcoTank and was a bit faster, but a set of genuine toner cartridges cost almost as much as the printer. And the inkjet is lighter, smaller and uses far less power.
The only down side is Epson's Linux drivers truly suck. They looked to provide source but it turns out that's just the front end - the rendering engine is shipped as pre-built libraries that get linked in at the end. And of course those libraries get SIGSEGV's, yielding only a bank page. Looking for the reason is how I found out there was no source for them. The scanner software their download centre offers didn't work at all. When I chased that down I found it was open source, provided presumably for free by kind person from Norway and Seiko rebranded it and made it available in their download section for my printer. That kind person did list the hardware it worked with, and my printer wasn't in the list so I don't know why Seiko put it there. Finally the PWG/Raster protocol, aka cups internal raster format, aka "cups driverless", aka cloud print didn't work at all. Way to go, Epson.
What did work is CUP's native escpr drivers. So I can print, and even with these old drivers the colour quality is better than the laser. So I'm happy. But brickbats to Seiko/Epson for their godawful software nonetheless.