Also, be careful about 3rd party cartridges that are "100% compatible" with Epson's. My company was using them for our Epson Stylus Photo EX. They worked for a little while, but we had problems with many of them not "breathing" (for lack of the correct term) properly. There would be too much of a vacuum and the ink would not come out of the cartridge, and we ended up throwing away defective cartridges full of ink. Then we noticed that they were leaking and gumming up the works in the printer. We ended up having so much damage done, the printer had to be sent in for repair. After getting the fixed printer back, we have used Epson cartriges only and have never had a problem. Also, the color quality was quite visibly worse using the ink in the generic cartriges. At any rate, I'm now convinced that it's worth the extra few bucks for the Epson cartridges, although I don't like the fact that they sell the hardware at a loss and bleed you dry on cartridges for the entire life of the printer.