Letters to the Editor
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Run it until it IS empty
My Bi-Di monitor software doesn't work anyway. Only the flashing red stupid light on the printer indicates anything. And so what? when it's empty it's empty. When it stops printing then replace the ink. If it stops printing before it's out of ink that's a different problem. That's actually fraud and Lexmark and Epson already lost that case. In fact I have as of today a $45 credit from Epson online for my portion of a class action settlement against Epson for this very reason. Otherwise ignore the stupid red light.
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And for what it's worth
Between 12 and 50% of all gas pumps in NC are wrong and defraud people according to more than one advocacy study. I myself just put 18 gallons into a 15.5 gallon tank. But since the Kwiky Mart guy only spoke in Xhosa click language I couldn't get any satisfaction.
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inkjet printers
Not only that. if you buy ink cartridges in bulk, to save money, and they lie around for a while while you wait for your current cartridge to empty out, you will find that replacing it with the new cartridge is pointless because a chip on the new cartridge was marked with an expiry date!
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maybe it's waistful, but.....
I don't even buy ink. I just buy a new printer when it runs out. There's a free printer in every box of ink cartridges.
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The cost of an ink refill...
...Is usually 50% of the cost of the printer itself. The cheapest refills I could find were H-P's, where an ink refill is $40 for both cartridges for an $80 printer. The upcharge is even more on a Epson photo-type printer where there are 6 or more cartridges (and they stop printing if one of the 6 is "out").
They are making money hand over fist on these disposables. The printer itself is nothing. In other words, printers are now like those disposable cameras where you are basically buying a plastic box to hold the film. Secondary market cartridges are chancy too - an Epson of mine stopped printing decently when I put in Cartridge World type cartridges.
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yea...
richard3 and I were on the same wavelength
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As new carts are half sized though
Lexmark does this - half sized starter carts. And I have never had a problem with any OEM cart for any Canon, Epson or Lexmark printer, ever. Printpal rules.
There used to be a website called What Things Cost or something that ranked the unit volume or weight cost of common items like gold, heroin, plutonium, wine, crack, gasoline, printer ink, human blood and such. The unit volume cost of printer ink is more expensive than almost everything else. Something like 10,000x the cost of what it takes to load materials on the space shuttle and put them in orbit.
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Laser printers aren't much better
The ridiculous per-page cost of inkjet printers is the reason why I only use laser printers... But the new printer at work (sold as Dell, I don't know who actually manufactured it) did the same thing as these inkjet scammers: it declared itself "nearly out of toner" for a full year before the prints were actually light enough to justify putting in the new toner cartridge. (Hint: even when laser toner starts to run light, you can take the cartridge out, give it a few light shakes, and get another month or so of service out of it.)
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Change when the print fades
I have long been aware that when I start receiving the message about the ink cartridge being low I can usually print quite a few more pages before the print actually starts fading. I simply use the warning as a signal to be sure to have a new cartridge on hand. I just don't actually change the cartridge until I actually need to.
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I ditched my Epson.
If it had only *just* been claiming to be out of ink early, that might not have gotten me so upset. It was the fact that I at one point put a brand new ink cartridge in, and within days (and not that many printouts) it was telling me that not only was it empty but it was refusing to even attempt to print with that cartridge.
So I replaced it with a cheapo laser printer because I almost never print in color anyway. Several years of university coursework later, I have not yet had to actually replace the cartridge at all. And most of the laser printers I've used in the past have allowed the user to keep printing until the thing was completely empty if you felt so inclined.
I don't care if the measurement is wrong, but if the printer is then going to start refusing to actually print even though there's a half-full cartridge still sitting in it, I don't need it.
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Printer software problem
I have a problem with my canon mp530. i want to keep printing with the "low" cartridge - it clearly still has ink in it just by looking - but at a point the software stops the print job on the computer and won't let it continue! The only options it gives you is to replace the cartridge or delete the print job.
How do you get around software like that that won't let you keep printing on "low ink"?
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Keep printing
This is the guy who said the last election wasn't stolen. Now he's trying for a new job.
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Do NOT let an inkjet printer run out of ink!
Children...and I hate to use that reference, but I was a kid too and grew up the hard way...when an inkjet printer runs out of ink, the little resistive heating elements (the thing that makes ink spit out) gets too hot. Without ink, it burns out. And there is nothing to do but replace the printhead.
With HP printers, the printhead is part of the cartrige. Not much of a problem. With Canon printers, you can usually remove and replace the printhead yourself...it's expensive and a pain. Maybe if you're lucky you can put the printhead in one of those vibrating ultrasonic jewelry cleaners and hope you can unclog the printhead (which can also happen). But with Epson printers, you can't remove the printhead at all. You can't even clean out a clogged printhead, unless you get some expensive and probably toxic "silicone cleaner" by mail order, and even that isn't guaranteed to work.
The bitch is this: Epson has the only affordable printers in the United States that will directly print on special CD's and DVD's, so you don't have to use those awful peeling labels that on disks that gum up players and can actually destroy DVD's. Canon has a similar printer for sale...in Australia...but some kind of patent crap keeps it from being sold in the United States. The only other choice besides an Epson is a $1500 printer/writer arrangement that no sane individual can afford.
So you're stuck with Epson. And that means you must print something every week, or it runs dry. If there were alternatives to Epson's CD printing, sensible people would flock to them. Hey, Canon and HP, how about it?