Is Your Printer Ink Really Empty?
Here’s a tip:
Don’t trust your printer when it tries to tell you that you’re nearly out of ink. Especially if your printer is an HP psc 1210 All-In-One!
Mine told me back in September that I was nearly out of black ink, so I ran out and got a new print cartridge for it. Since I print a lot for both school and work, I knew I couldn’t afford to run out of ink. But I decided not to change the cartridge until I could see a noticeable drop in quality.
I’m still waiting, 6 months later, for that print quality to drop. And if you average out my printing, I probably print one page a day (yes, black - I rarely print color, I haven’t replaced the color cartridge in two years!). So that means that my printer can churn out over 180 pages on a “nearly empty” cartridge. (And counting!)
Moral of the story: the little warning icon might be a good indicator of when you should buy a new cartridge, but you can probably squeeze out quite a bit before you actually need to change the cartridge.
Also, here’s an indication of my insanity - once I do change the cartridge, I’m going to make a spreadsheet to track exactly how many pages I can get out of a cartridge. Yep - I’m nuts!
Although, maybe not that nuts - there are a lot of people that track things like this. I seem to remember a website where people could enter in how many miles they got on their tank after the gas gauge hit E… one of you reading this wouldn’t happen to know the name of that site, would you?
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I’ve been rolling my eyes at my work printer for the last month as it told me to “order supplies”, “toner is low”, etc, in addition to showing me a graphic with empty levels for the magenta and yellow cartridge. I have backups for when it finally REALLY runs out, but it’s still chugging away!
Comment by singlemomindebt — March 20, 2008 @ 9:25 am
hahah its funny your write about this because I am in the same boat right now.
My Epson r280 has been giving me the “low black ink” warning for about 2 weeks, and still it continues to print perfectly fine. I hope to see an update when your black ink finally DOES run out, I wonder how long it will take…
Comment by Dan — March 20, 2008 @ 10:55 am
I think if you simply print black most of the time you should find a nice low cost per page laser printer, and just take your colour in to a print sop for colour printing and copies when you need it.
I have an HP 5550 that hasn’t printed a page in a while of anything just because HP ink is incredibly expensive for their ink jets. I got it when the launched the PhotoRet IV technology touting their printers as one of the best photo printers on the market. It’s junk compared to 35 cent prints at a print shop, or even the 19 cent prints at the grocery store.
Comment by Traciatim — March 20, 2008 @ 12:05 pm
Something very similar happened to us a few weeks ago. We took them in the be refilled at the local Walgreens and it turns out that we still had a lot in the black cartridge!
Comment by JW Thornhill — March 20, 2008 @ 4:06 pm
http://www.nodebtplan.net/2008/01/25/the-cost-of-ink/
Good point, Stephanie. On top of that, don’t pay $30 for one ink cartridge. I recently paid $52 or so for -12- ink cartridges (2 full reloads of my Canon with the separate color inks, plus 2 more blacks) from 123inkjets. We’ve had no problems with quality.
On top of that, we bought through FatWallet and earned $11 in cash back. It was a STEAL.
Comment by No Debt Plan — March 20, 2008 @ 10:18 pm
Stephanie, Great subject. I used to respect HP a lot more than I do now. The have a reputation for quality that they have put at risk by sleazy practices related to selling printer consumables.
I have two HP Laserjet 2550 color printers. These are small office color printers and HP has sold a horde of them. Along with the printers come software that supposedly helps maintain quality, but the real purpose is to get you to buy more toner from HP and scare you about using toner from other vendors. (HP has been sued for doing this in the past.)
Well, HP has rigged up these printers to stop printing when a certain count of pages has been processes. Then the software tells you the toner is gone and you have to buy more. Each toner cartridge cost about $75. Futhermore, they pull the same garbage with the color imaging drum, which costs over $150.
If you can trick the printer into thinking a toner cartridge is new, then it will keep printing even after the printer refuses to print. For example, currently the black toner cartridge has been printing for two months after it supposedly was out of toner.
If you have one of these printers, here is how to defeat these artificial restrictions. (It took me over an hour of searching printer forums to learn this.) Each toner cartridge has a little chip on the outside with a very small plastic dome on it. (This is so you can identify it.) All you have to do is to use a knife to carefully pry the chip off the toner cartridge. Do this on two toner cartridges and swap the chips. Again be careful not to break the chip, but this process is really not very hard to do. All the chips are the same. When you swap them, the printer thinks the cartridge is new and it resets the counter. Then, you can keep printing until the cartridge actually runs out of toner.
These printers work wonderfully, but HP is robbing its customers when it pulls this crap. Given their reputations for putting the customer first, I bet that founders Hewlett and Packard would roll over in their graves, if they knew what current HP management thought was an acceptable business practice.
Comment by Barb Ryan @ Pasadena Financial Planner — April 2, 2008 @ 9:20 pm
Dang! I will look for toner cartridge chip–thanks for that clue.
My HP Photosmart 261 Oxi also tells me it’s out of ink when there’s still plenty of black ink in the cartridge. I’ve discovered it will keep printing quite a while longer if you take the cartridge out, shake it for a few seconds, and then reinstall it. This will keep it running until it actually stops depositing ink on the paper, which is quite a few pages more than HP claims.
Once when I did that I got a message saying an old cartridge had been installed (hah! now we know how it knew). I just pressed OK and it continued to run.
In a pinch, if you can save a document to your word processor, highilght all, and then select dark blue for the font color, you can at least print something out. No good for a business letter, but if you need a print record of something, it works.
Comment by Funny about Money — April 5, 2008 @ 10:53 am
@Funny about Money -
That’s a great tip for when you’re in a pinch! It also might just be good to do in general. If you find you’re like me at all, and your color cartridges far outlast your black ink, then you might consider printing some things in a dark blue or green.
Obviously, like you said, this probably wouldn’t be good for something you’re sending out to someone else, but for stuff for your own records? It’ll work!
Comment by Stephanie — April 5, 2008 @ 12:27 pm
If you are only printing one page a day then the cartridge is going to last some considerable time after is showing low. Text pages only acoount for 5% coverage and use little ink - just keep going.
On the subject of cartridge chips, these are becoming the norm for most manufacturers and many are indeed made to limit the number of prints obtained from a cartridge, some printers can be used by removing the chip and others can be fooled into believing a new cartridge has been installed. manufacturers are aware of these limitations so expect the next generation of chips to overcome these tricks.
Comment by Printer Wizard — April 23, 2008 @ 12:10 pm
I’ve used the old shake ‘em up trick before and as for the cartridge chip restricting how many copies we can print I think a disgraceful practice. We buy a new cartridge surely it’s our right to be able to use up ALL the ink in it!
Comment by Office Supplies — April 25, 2008 @ 3:55 am
Regarding #9 from Printer Wizard:
Absolutely. I use the HP 2550s mainly for black text printing, but they are very good with color. The way the limiting software is set up, my experience is that I am using less than 50% of the toner, before the HP software shuts off printing. By the way, the HP 2550 was the main small office printer from HP for several years, so we are talking probably hundreds of thousands of printers sold
With any other laser printer you have an idea when it is running out of toner. Then you can shake it and finish your print job, while you buy another. The HP software gives warnings, but when you do beyond them you could be printing a 40 page document for a client due in an hour and get shut down in the middle.
Regarding #10 from Office Supplies
Yes, you bought it and did not rent or lease the toner on a per page basis. This like buying a bottle of wine that only empties half way. However, the bottle is black and you cannot see what is left inside.
While this particular HP printer division probably made more revenue, they put HP’s entire product reputation at risk. They counted on the cat never getting out of the bag.
By the way, simply shut down the HP software. While it provides some useful services to manage the HP 2550 printer, you do not have to have the software running. The HP software also gives you all sorts of dire warnings about risking your printer and nullifying your warranty, if you don’t buy toner cartridges from HP.
Yup, I will be disgusted about this with HP for awhile. There are other brands of printers I can buy. PCs and servers, too.
Comment by Barb Ryan — April 25, 2008 @ 1:47 pm
I started using eBay a few months ago and when I started printing all of my shipping labels I soon came to find a “warning” that my ink was low. So, I bought some ink and started waiting for signs to show and no signs are showing. Weird how these things work!
Glad I didn’t just replace it right away. Also, I am not going to be putting my color cartridge in until I am printing color. I hardly printed any and it is “empty” too!
Comment by Jessica — May 6, 2008 @ 12:45 am
I was immediately going to replace the cartridge when it said no toner - until I came across this site. I have a Samsung SCX-4200. It is still printing away! I thought it was funny you are going to keep a spreadsheet. Would love to see the results.
Comment by Polly — June 3, 2008 @ 2:13 pm
Does anyone know where the “chip” is in a brother LC51y is?
Comment by John — October 7, 2008 @ 5:44 pm