Epson have launched a service in competition to our unlimited ink home & home office print solution (Infinity)…

They call it ReadyPrint and say you get a printer and unlimited colour prints for £14.99 a month.

But the caveat is you pay a one off £79.99 activation fee too.

Which basically means you are paying for the printer, and they’re dressing it up as something else to pull the wool over your eyes.

They also allow you to buy your own printer, after you’ve paid out £50 – £100 on the printer, it’s then another £16.49 a month for 500 pages, and every extra page is another 10p on top.

In-comparison we’ll provide you with a multi-function printer with unlimited ink (no strings attached) for £11.99 a month, we warrant the printer for life and guarantee your price will never increase.

The Register have reported Epson are encountering problems with the ReadyPrint service, their systems are blocking subscriptions for Natwest and RBS banking customers.

Although it’s not the fault of the customer, Epson are blocking customers printers and not allowing them to print, even if the printer is owned by the customer.

The Register say reader (John Lamont) signed up for ReadyPrint last year, and the service worked perfectly until February when he got an email informing him that it had not been possible to collect his monthly payment, Epson would attempt collection again in 14 days.

The email warned Mr Lamont his cartridges would stop working following 2 unsuccessful attempts by Epson to obtain payment for the subscription service.

However, despite Mr Lamont updating his account details (as advised by the email from Epson) the monthly payment was still not taken, and he found himself with a printer that refused to print.

The printer simply displayed a message saying: “The ReadyPrint service is unavailable due to an account issue.”

Epson customer services told Mr Lamont to “please try with a card from another bank if possible (not RBS or Natwest).”

So it appeared the problem is with Epson’s back-end systems taking payment from Natwest or RBS accounts.

The Register reported another Epson customer tweeted:

“Hello @EpsonUK, you have a known issue with ReadyPrint taking payments from Natwest, and yet you have disabled MY printer because of a problem which is not my fault. I cannot phone up to pay and cannot print anything. Please sort this out, I am not the only user affected!”

Mr Lamont went on to tell The Register. “Epson cannot blame the banks if they are aware of the issue then fail to communicate this to their customers, which they have not done.

Their solution is to do nothing, then block their customer’s £400 printer when they fail to receive payment, knowing why the payment has failed, and not doing anything to prevent the sorry situation,” he added.

Sometimes when a service get’s too technical it can cause more problems than it solves.

…which is why we keep things simple, delivering ink cartridges fast and free without blocking printers.