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InkJet Printers Lying, Or Just Wrong?
akkarin writes in about a study reported at Ars Technica on how accurate ink-jet printers are when they report that cartridges are empty. Not very, it turns out. Epson came out on top of the study (and Ars rightly questions how objective it was, given that Epson paid for it), but even they waste 20% of the ink if users take the printers' word for when to get a new cartridge. On average, the printers in the study wasted more than half the ink that users bought.
There's actually a free software that's available that can be used to reset the chips in several brands of ink cartridges. I'm not sure if you need any type of hardware, but I've heard good things about it.
It allows you to reset the numbers and use the remainder of the ink, before it makes you replace it.
If you ask me, the feature that stops you from using a cartridge after the ink is too low, is pretty ignorant. I think it's obvious when the ink is completely out, so why not let the user decide?
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
Yes.
I've found 'extra' ink in both my Epson and HP inkjet printers. I'd use refill kits, but the cartridges tend to leak over time, and refilling takes a lot of time and effort. In the meantime, for Epson printers, just go with the el cheapo compatible cartridges from places like Inkco. Epson C88 cartridges are $5 a pieces, as opposed to to ~$25 for branded cartridges.
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Here at work we have this HP laser printer that's always complaining about low ink. It just so happens we found an "emergency" option buried in the menus that allows us to keep printing until the toner actually dies.
I've been a long time fan of Canon photo printers, in fact I just bought a Pixma Pro9000. Their ink tanks are clear so if you doubt what the printer is saying you can eyeball it for yourself. So far it's been very accurate about remaining ink level.
I used to work at an outsourced call centre, supporting Epson printers and scanners. By far the biggest customer complaints we received always had to do with printers wasting ink.
During our training, and from talking to various Epson reps, we learned that the printer doesn't actually monitor the amount of ink in each cartridge. Rather, it estimates the amount left, based on the various print settings chosen.
The worst part is that on many printers, once it "thinks" it's out of ink, it will no longer print until you change the cartridge. In some older printers, you could simply remove the cartride and then put it back into place, tricking it into thinking you replaced it with a new cartridge. However, this would make the ink monitor even less accurate. Newer printers won't even allow this, because the circuitry on the cartridge itself will lock you out once it has reached the estimated empty level.
There are some tools available that let you reset the "intelligent cartridges" so that they can be refilled and reused, but of course they aren't supported by Epson and may void your warranty.
The second issue is a familiar one: multi-ink cartridges can be rendered "empty" when only one color runs low. Multi-ink cartridges store three to five colors in a single cartridge. Printing too many photos from the air show will kill your cartridge faster than you can say "blue skies," as dominant colors (say, "blue") are used faster than the others.
That's interesting. I had never thought of how much ink was potentially being wasted by using a printer with a multi-color ink cartridge. I always just thought it was easier so I leaned towards printers that used a single 'color' ink cartridge. Now I know better.
I'll provide a simple example. You can buy a Lexmark for 25 or less here in Spain in many places. A compatible unbranded ink cartridge for it would cost more than 35. I didn't even dare to ask how much original ones were...
My 0.02 cents
I've got a Canon S750, and it is great on reporting ink levels. It also has three separate color cartridges, which is nice. There have a been a few times when it was over zealous in reporting low ink, but all I had to do was take the cartridge out and put it back in and it ran fine until it was actually out of ink.
Transistors and Beer!!
Google for 'SSC Service Utility' for Epson printers. This allows you reset ink levels on cartridges using the printer, and can also reset the 'protection counter' on Epsons, which once at a certain level prevents you from using the printer until it has been serviced.
With laser printers, what you're describing isn't all that uncommon, because the toner hopper is the width of the drum, but the sensor on most printers is at one end. If the printer isn't level, all the toner ends up at one end of the cartridge, and you get false readings. Even after the printer says you're out of toner, you can usually remove the cartridge and lightly pivot it a few times to redistribute the toner and get a few dozen/hundred more pages. That doesn't apply to printers with an independent toner hopper, but those are practically non existent in the non-pro class these days.
This isn't the same at all as what inkjets do, which is refuse to print even when the cartridge is clearly still half full, waste most of the ink cleaning the cartridge, etc...
We use Epson inkjet receipt printers at my hardware store and we put a small piece of masking tape over the cartridge ink window. We find that we get an extra week or two of use out of a cartridge by covering the ink window. When the ink runs out (i.e. the receipt is blank) we swap the cartridge.
John
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
One of the biggest problem I have with lasers, aside from photo quality, is that paper handling isn't so good as compared to an inkjet. Inkjets can print on a variety of different media - envelopes, glossy photo paper, card stock, etc. Most inexpensive lasers have very poor paper handling in that they have an inability to print on anything thicker than thick bond or thin card stock. More expensive printers have no problem, but then they are not cost competitive with an inkjet.
Also, cheap lasers tend to wear out quicker than inkjets, in my experience.
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Which makes me wonder, why not just sell the damn printer at a profit and then stop going so anal about the ink?
Ask Gillette.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
In case there are any young ones around, a color HP printer in 1996 was $200 something. Ink was $15 for black and $15 for color so $30 and it lasted for my use over a year. Color was a novelty then too so that was impressive for the amount of waste I went through.
Today you can get a printer for under $100 and EACH color is $15 and it lasts 3 months.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
I've seen the same fading on laser printers, but the simple act of rocking the toner cartridge side to side and placing it back in the printer improved print quality for a little while (if done every once in a while, until I completely ran out of toner).
Seriously, how many people do you think spend over 1k on a printer and ink over a reasonable period of time? Say 5 years?
That is a LOT of ink refills on an inkjet.
That's more than most people pay for a new rig these days, including a tower, monitor AND printer.
If you actually print that much, you already know all this and have already moved up to a more professional printing solution. If you're just a home user, that's just a total waste of money.
Never mind that I can EASILY print over 5k pages on an inkjet with separated and refillable cartridges, WAY more than that actually.
Look, inkjets sell as they are because they are cost effective for most people. If they weren't, they wouldn't sell. Period. Those that are a bit smarter also know that they can reduce the cost by buying a half decent inkjet with separated color cartridges, and by refilling said cartridges themselves. Not all inkjets use microchip locked cartridges you know.
As well, more and more people ARE taking their pictures to walmart ow wherever to get their pictures printed. I know virtually no one that prints off lots of pictures at home as it does use a lot of ink, doesn't look nearly as good, and fades noticeably over short periods of time.
At home I print what I'd deem to be a fairly average amount. My costs for operating my printer are negligible. What would be a waste of money is to throw out what works for no good reason. I'd need a VERY good reason to replace my printer, let alone drop 1k on a laser printer.
No Comment.
I also find that I can print quantities of pictures faster by driving to Target, giving them my SD card, and coming back in an hour. At over two minutes each to print at home, it only takes about 30 or so prints to make the whole process faster. Plus I'm not cautiously stacking damp ink prints all over the desk, hand-feeding tiny glossy sheets into the printer, and watching the ink tanks run dry. It's a lot more convenient.
The biggest advantage, though, is the images are exposed on photographic paper and chemically processed just like a film image. The reason this is an advantage is the longevity of photographic paper is well understood. When properly cared for, color photographs are expected to last 75 years or more. Inkjet is a relatively new technology (only about 20 years old), and picture durability is still fairly unknown; although recent tests are estimating properly cared-for inkjet prints will last only 25 years, maybe less. It's definitely variable by manufacturer, paper and ink.
John
I've been a long time fan of Canon photo printers, in fact I just bought a Pixma Pro9000. Their ink tanks are clear so if you doubt what the printer is saying you can eyeball it for yourself. So far it's been very accurate about remaining ink level.
It's hard to say the true accuracy of the Canon tanks, though they do seem to be reasonably accurate. They have a chip based ink couter, but he main meter seems to be the prism, when the reservoir is empty you get a low ink warning. Less experenced people might replace the cartridge, but this indicates there is 20% left in the sponge. From there you can continue printing until the printer says "ink is out", and if you are willing to disable the meter and click the "I accept the risk".
Canons are somewhat wasteful on their cleaning cycles. Users I know tend to say a given cartridge lasts 9 to 12 months before becoming empty. Epson in my experence is worse in terms of raw volume.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Assuming we're talking about the same company, that is probably a rebranded Lexmark printer. Lexmark is well-known as the most assholish printer manufacturer around.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have found that nice laser printers can be had on ebay for cheap because of the abundance of off-business-lease printers. You can pick up a HP 4050 with duplexer and networking for $100 or less + shipping. That's a nice B/W printer. Color are still more, but much more affordable than retail price. Business class HP LaserJets are designed to last a long time, so the fact that they are used for a few years should have little bearing on the longevity they'll provide to a home user.
I started down the route of looking for cheap colour inkjet printing a lot earlier than most of you other fellows, by the look of it.
The stages I went through were:
Epson's own cartridges - about £12 each
Other brand cartridges - about £5 each
Refilling Epson carts - about £1.50 each (bottled ink from Proprint) and messy.
(you need a cartridge resetter from Proprint - £5)
Buying Skyhorse 2-part tank cartridges and refilling these - £1.50 and clean.
( http://www.tianma.net.cn/asp_en/index.asp ) and see two-part cartridge
Buying a Continuous Ink Supply (CIS) from ebay - £40 with about £40 worth of ink included - equivalent cartridge cost hard to tell, either the ink or the kit came free!
Refilling the CIS with OCP ink bought straight from the importer - equivalent cartridge cost £0.32p per cartridge.
Finally, I have a top end printer and ink costs so low that I can ignore them. If anyone asks for it, I will tell you the address for the ink importers who sell top quality ink for about £2 per 100ml. (UK only) And if I do, I expect to get modded informative!
Kodak has a line of full-size inkjet printers. They charge a bit more for the printer ($150 for a pretty standard multifunction with 6 colors), but the cartridge costs are MUCH cheaper. $10 for black that is supposed to last ~300 pages of full text, and $15 for a 5-color cartridge. Or you can buy them together for $22.
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It was a reference to the really cheap HP printers, which do, in fact, automatically expire after a certain period of time.
Fortunately, there are workarounds.
I don't change the ink until I don't see ink coming out on the page. How hard can that be?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Know a lot of professional photographers who take their CF cards to Wally World to get prints, do you?
I print photographs, fine art prints, all sorts of stuff, on my Epson R1800. The photos actually look better than 'real' photos, and are lightfast and waterproof. The media and ink is rated for archival use, and is supposed to be stable for like a hundred years. How much of that is reality and how much is bullshit, I don't know. But none of my large-ass (13x19, for example) photographic inkjet prints have faded or discolored. (Unlike actual photos I have.) Being a now exclusively digital photographer, I really have no desire to trust the second most important part of the process; output, to someone else. If I were still using film, I'd be doing my own prints. But you know what? Digital is much more economical, and with current technology, yields almost identical results. (And it will only get better from here.)
The printer was roughly $500, and the ink is like $120 for all seven colors, and the gloss optimizer...which will last about a month at most. I'm now switching to a third-party continuous flow system for my R1800 that uses a custom archival ink which is $140 for 4 ounces of each color. (I am told that's roughly 10 times what's in the cartridges.)
Different people have different needs, but to be honest, I don't know anyone who actually gets digital photos printed at a store. In my experience, the people with digitals print their own, and the people who would get the stuff printed, still use film. But that's my two yen.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
What doesn't make any sense is taking my opinion as to what you should do (Given that I am not god, I should not have to prefix all statemens with "in my opinion" - of course it's my fucking opinion) as the only possible solution. It is simply the solution that I feel makes the most sense.
One of the ways in which slashdot is enormously frustrating is that if you don't terminate the beginning and end of every fucking statement with a disclaimer, someone is sure to piss, moan, bitch, and complain about the way you said it.
The cost per page for printing on an inkjet is insane. Most people need color only for sharing photos with stupid people who can't handle getting prints, which would be better anyway because they'd be in the size they actually wanted.
Hence, it makes more sense for most people to have a black and white laser and have photo prints done by someone else, who will do it better and cheaper. It makes more financial sense. I have a B&W laser printer good for 20,000 pages per month, for which I paid $300 (including the network interface card, which I added post-sale.) And I simply don't print color because I hate paper and have too much already, but it's still cheaper to send out.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Unless it has a separate waste container and it likely doesn't, all of that toner that is supposedly in that cart may be waste toner. We have waste containers in our big ones to catch it. I am betting most companies just dump it somewhere in the bottom of the cart. Lasers DO waste alot of toner, but not nearly as bad as inkjets.
Gorkman
Tying hemp to pot is what is preventing hemp from being legalized in the USA. It's legal in Canada, and is becoming quite profitable. The legality of hemp in the US has nothing to do with a perceived threat to public health, and everything to do with a perceived threat to business: first to the cotton industry, now to corn and wood pulp.
Do you know what would happen if a hemp farmer hid a small plot of marijuana in his field? The plants would cross-pollinate, resulting in a small area of slightly poorer-quality hemp surrounding the worst-quality pot anyone had ever smoked--worse than the ridiculous attempt to grow medicinal marijuana at the bottom of a mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba. Hemp farmers would not grow pot. It would be a miserable failure.
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I work IT for a national park. Thus, I am surrounded by a lot of crunchy granola types who are always going on and on about conservation and the environment and not wasting anything. Except when it comes to printing. Right now, there are 5 or 6 different departments, which share 20 laser printers of varying model from HP, and ALL of them are out of toner or running dangerously low. Due to the remoteness of our location, getting new supplies in is a painfully slow process. The reason they are all out of toner? They feel the need to print every goddamn screen or Excel file so they can read it or show it to someone else. Keep in mind, these people also have laptops and PDAs apart from the desktops and we have a locally shared folders and our own Exchange. Whether printers report their toner/ink levels accurately is a moot point, AFIAC. The real waste is among people who refuse to use email, screen reading aids, and portable devices to read and share their work. The one part of the 21st century I believe most people around me have caught onto is digital photography. We all use digital cameras and online photo storage sites. I rarely see a printed photograph anymore and am usually surprised when I do. Thus, in a picturesque part of the world, surrounded by gorgeous scenery and lush woodlands, about 1200 environmental hippies are tearing through tons of paper all so that Person A can show a paragraph to Person B, sitting 5 feet away at another desk.
I'd never heard of waste toner -- and I've never had a problem with toner running out before expected EOL on my old Epson laser -- but I Googled and found this. Looks like my next laser will be a Toshiba.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I probably spent far more than the printer was worth over 4 or 5 ink cartridge purchases... I printed near nothing, but I would've saved money under the "fair pricing for printer and cartridges" model.
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