Comments on: Is Your Printer Ink Really Empty?

By: Saturday Roundup: A day late and a dollar short edition « Funny about Money

Saturday Roundup: A day late and a dollar short edition « Funny about Money — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:54:31 +0000

[...] they’ll soon be needing…ouch!). Poorer Than You has an eye-opening post about how to foil those darn messages from your printer that tell you the ink cartridge is almost empty-when it’s not. And over at Get Rich Slowly, [...]

By: John

John — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:44:56 +0000

Does anyone know where the “chip” is in a brother LC51y is?

By: Polly

Polly — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:13:32 +0000

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.

By: Jessica

Jessica — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:45:14 +0000

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!

By: Barb Ryan

Barb Ryan — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:47:36 +0000

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.

By: Office Supplies

Office Supplies — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 07:55:03 +0000

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!

By: Printer Wizard

Printer Wizard — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:10:40 +0000

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.

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 16:27:07 +0000

@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!

By: Funny about Money

Funny about Money — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 14:53:58 +0000

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.

By: Barb Ryan @ Pasadena Financial Planner

Barb Ryan @ Pasadena Financial Planner — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:20:47 +0000

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.