The ink inside an Epson cartridge is held in separate chambers for each colour (which is lucky really!) Specifically, though, the ink is held inside sponges... presumably, this is to stop the ink ‘falling’ out of the cartridge; essentially, it forces the printer to pull ink out of the cartridge, rather than pushing ink out of the print head.

In addition to the sponge, there is a small metal filter inside the cartridge, presumably as a last catch-all for out-size particles in the ink.

The following two images show an Epson cartridge for an 1160 opened up; one with the cartridge as opened, another with the Yellow position sponge removed and cleaned out somewhat.

You can see that the sponge is actually quite a deal larger than the actual cell in which it is forced. You can also just see the metallic filter at the bottom of the cell too.

The cartridge design also includes a small air-inlet with a maze of air passageways. This apparently reduces the likelihood of the ink evaporating.

One item of possible interest is that the filter and outlet port is raised off the bed of the cartridge some way. This will naturally prevent some ink from ever being used, which seems wasteful; but perhaps it is for a reason? We are not aware of what that might be.

More Recent Cartridge Designs

A couple of years ago, Epson added the ‘Intelligent Chip’ to their cartridges under the name ‘Intellidge Chip™’. This chip keeps track of the amount of ink used in the cartridge. The cartridges shown are from an Epson 1270 / 1290 Printer. Along with the chip, another new feature developed with this printer was the valve in the outlet port of the printer. Cartridges are still shipped with a clear plastic seal on the outlet port, but ink will not flow unless the valve behind it is activated by the ‘prongs’ inside the printer-cartridge-holder. This seems to be another Epson patented feature that makes good sense... certainly the ability to remove the cartridge without fear of ink leakage is an excellent feature.

Unfortunately, it seems that as a patented feature, no third-party cartridges are able to put a simple valve behind the outlet seal; thus the need for items such as the ‘EZ-Plugs’ that we sell with the Continous Inking Systems.

The chip also creates problems for third-party ink providers, who need to be able to provide alternative chips that can provide the same information to the printer as the Epson chips do. These days, the basic chips for the 1270 / 1290 and so forth have their substitutes; but chips for more recent models like the C80 do not have commonly available subsitutes at this time. Still, if you have a 1290 and like to refill your own cartridges, you will need a chip-resetter... and for CIS usage, our better ‘100% full’ chip that never needs resetting!

And Still More Recent Design

The spread of the Intellidge Chip™ has now moved on to the larger cartridges for the Epson 7600 and 9600 printers. These cartridges are larger capacity (up to and over 100ml of ink in each)... and feature more capabilities in the chip apparently.

Similarly more and more desktop printers are being released with chips that provide more features.

Please note that MWORDS has closed. We aim to retain these support pages in the hope that they may benefit our past customers, but regret that we can no longer offer further comment or support in relation to the information above.