Ann, It really depends.
In my about 5 years of using Epson R2880, I've had 3-4 bad cartridges: 1) those showing being empty after the first page printed, and 2) those showing being empty suddenly after (and while still) having about half of a cartridge. All those were genuine Epson cartridges purchased from Atlex. In one case it was a cartridge far before the expiration date, in two cases, those were cartrdiges close to the expiration date. I don't know if the expiration date has any effect and indeed increases the probability of the cartridge being bad, or that is a manufacturing defect. (IRC, all faulty cartridges were from different batches, and some of different colors.) Also, in principle, my understanding is that the old cartridge may have higher probability for the the jet to get plugged with something (dry pigment?). That happened to some of my cartridges, especially after a long break without printing. It goes away if you go through one or a few cleaning cycles (done via the utility in the printer driver), but you waste some considerable amount of ink in the process. At the same time, I just used a cartridge that was about 1 year beyond the expiration date, and had no problem with it. And some of my current cartridges are also beyond their expiration point. No problem so far. Igor On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 5:52 PM, Ann Sanfedele wrote: > I had a #40 gift cretif for Amazon so how could I resist a $4.95 cyan > cartridge - when I got it, the date on the bottom of the box was 06 > 2012 > ... > > Think I'm ok? > The thought of sending it back is really annoying -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
