Speed Reading — Level 5 — 200 wpm 

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Are you fed up with paying lots of money for ink cartridges that finish soon after you buy them? Help may be here. The printer company Epson has just released some new printers with enough ink to last the average person two years. Its new EcoTank printers can print 6,500 pages in colour and 4,000 pages in black. Epson said a family usually prints 200 pages a month. The days of using cartridges with a short life span are over. With the new printer, users pour new ink into the tank. People will save around 65 per cent on printing costs with the new printers.

Profits from ink cartridges are falling. People are printing less and sharing more on social media. People have been unhappy with printer makers over the marketing of ink cartridges. The business model has relied on the idea of "planned obsolescence". Companies put as little ink as possible into the cartridge so it runs out quickly, making consumers buy more. Some cartridges have chips to prevent the user from printing more than a set number of pages, even though the cartridge may still be half full. A newspaper said printer ink costs the equivalent of over $4,700 a litre.

Back to the printer ink lesson.

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