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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.
Hearing this pisses me off. I realize it's a competitive market, but every company out there charges insane amounts for ink. Hell, even the 3rd party refills are expensive. I'd rather pay the real price for a printer and have reasonable ink prices, but I guess that would kill the 1000% markup they have on ink. Laser isn't much better, but at least it doesn't feel like virtual buggering.
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.
My blog
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.
Although I heard about it from ecogeek. It has links to the Ars Technica article also, but I really just wanted to point out the nice Office Space picture.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Well, at least the printer industry is losing one customer. I've been kinda wanting one of those photo-printers for some time, but I know that they are only going to rip me off. Are there any honest printer manufacturers out there, that sells the printers for a reasonable price, and then sells the cartridges for what they actually cost to produce (plus of course, a reasonable profit margin)?
c++;
Get a laser printer already. Even the color models have dropped in price.
Given all of the insanity surrounding refilling ink cartridges, DMCA lawsuits, "authenticity checks" on cartridges, and the give them the printer sell them the cartridges style business is anyone, anyone at all, even remotely surprised, maybe even just raised an eyebrow, that the vendors would stoop so low as to have the printer lie to you to get you to go buy another "DMCA protected authentic cartridge we are gunna sue you if you try to refill it" item that costs nearly as much as the stupid printer did in the first place as often as possible?
I am just gunna call "well duh" on this whole thing. I have worked with HP laserjets that told me I had 200 pages left that I could print. After printing 192 pages it told me I could still print 320 pages. All said and done that day, I had printed some 500 pages and its final number was that I could still print another 250ish pages. Whether they lie, or their math is freaking horrible for figuring it out is up for debate I suppose, but given the problems we have had with that same model and HP accusing us of theft because a brand new HP cartridge out of the box was determined to be not authentic by the stupid machine...well I assume they are just out for blood. 4 hours of fighting with their technician to have them exchange the stupid cartridge.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
I don't own a printer at home, and don't want one. They're too expensive to operate and maintain. I find that I can do nearly everything I want to do electronically. When I do need to print something out, I'll go to a place like Kinko's and do it there. This has the added benefit of forcing me to really think about whether I truly need a paper copy, and most often I find I can do without. The overhead of having a non-shitty printer at home that I have to take care of just isn't worth it for me.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The letter quality was amazing compared to my dot matrix, and when they started printing in color, and I could print photos, it was great.
Somewhere along the line, the price gouging for ink came about. I had an epson 740 for a long time, and bought ink from some third party source at very reasonable prices (~$10/ cartridge). The ink was just as good as anything else I'd used, as far as I could tell.
I had the sad wake up call about a year ago, when the epson 740 finally died. I looked and looked for a printer that would accept third party ink cartridges, and couldn't find anything reasonable. My wife's in grad school, and does a lot of printing, so I eventually went with a Brother laser printer that ran me about $150, plus $75 or so for a toner cartridge. (Although after many months, we're still using the "starter" cartridge.)
Because my old printer hung on for so long, I was rather abruptly thrust into this brave new world of ink pricing and vendor lock in. It's sad to realize that the five year old printer I had, because of the availability of third party ink cartridges, was a far better product than anything I could buy today. I'm afraid the same thing will happen to laser printers at some point, and who knows what I'll do. Perhaps that will finally push us into the paperless lifestyle we were all promised a decade ago.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Inkjet ink works out to be more expensive, by volume, than the most expensive Bollinger champagne which is why the money-grabbing manufacturers can virtually give the printers away but rip you off for cartridges. In some cases, it is actually cheaper to throw the printer away and buy a new one than it is to buy replacement cartridges - how *GREAT* is that for our environment.
Grow up, people! Take your nicely-edited photos down to a printing booth or shop and get your photos printed in *MUCH BETTER QUALITY* and at a cheaper cost than what you can do on a home inkjet. Then invest in a cheap laser printer to just print letters and documents when you need to.
And the sooner VoIP phones and wireless access kicks out the price-fixing cellular phone providers, the better...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
...I chisel all of my important documents in stone.
2) It's pretty easy for Epson to have rigged the test so that multi-ink cartridges did particularly badly (although in my experience they really are that wasteful).
3) Assuming accurate wording of the message, I'd much prefer to get a warning when the ink is low but there's time to get a replacement than to get it only at the last possible moment -- I can figure out for myself when the ink is really gone. The article claims users rush to change cartridges as soon as a message pops up, but those workers are a lot more proactive than those in any office I've ever worked in.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I bought an HP Photosmart D7360 a few months ago.. Since then, I've printed at least a thousand 4x6 photos. I've changed the ink a bunch of times.. but I always wait until I finally see a photo print with low ink.
However, if I use the lame HP software that starts up with my computer (and slows it down quite a bit), it flat out refuses to let me print unless I change 'empty' cartriges first. It also annoys the living hell out of me with 'low ink' popups while I'm playing video games or doing other things - like the printer is the whole fucking reason I exist.
In Ubuntu, I just use whatever driver it found for my printer... and I can print beautiful prints with 'empty' cartriges. It pisses me off..
But, I will admit, I really do get about 200 4x6 photos with a single set of cartriges like HP advertises.. this is the first printer I've had (besides laser of course) that actually lives up to how many prints it advertises.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
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'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!!
so wait - the inkjets report that cartridge needs replacement and people just do it? whatever happened to visual inspection?! We have a Dell color printer (laser, not inkjet but same argument) which starts giving out the "replace cartridge soon" message about ~1000 pages in advance. So we buy the cartridge, keep it on hand, and only replace it when we actually see that the print quality is considerably degraded. I can understand the problem if the inkjet stops printing anything at all based on its preemptive warning messages (like a software lockdown), but if it continues to work irrespective of the amount of ink then just look at the output and make your decision.
In fact, I would rather have the machine give the warning earlier than later so I can have one ordered and ready to replace when the need comes, instead of waiting for all the ink to dry out and the printer goes out of service until the cartridges arrive.
My sig has been answered.
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.
They grab that tube, start at one end of the brush, and just hammer that brush, covering it to the last bristle with toothpaste.
Is the cleanliness of the teeth proportional to the amount of paste used? No.
Are sales driven by encouraging people to use more product? Yes.
Why does the 'corporate we' seem so surprised when we occasionally wake up and realize that vendors are trying to cajole more sales?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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
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!
Wow, this has been one of those things that really piss me off for quite some time. While it is true that the laser jet printers do better than inkjets they ALSO LIE and ARE DESIGNED TO FAIL.
For example; I bought a laser two years ago (from a company that rhymes with hell). I bought it because I needed to print letters to clients and do things like print checks. Nothing heavily graphics intensive nor really heavy duty text work either.
So here is what I discovered with my 'efficient' laser printer; My '5000 page' toner cartridge prints about 1000 pages. Pissed, I decided to open one up as they are about $100 for a new one.
Lo and behold it was still full of toner. Somehow, as the printer printed the quality of the prints degraded as the toner 'ran out' a little more with each print. At the time I figured this was because there was no toner but the proof was now in my hands (and all over my desk for that matter) so I decided to investigate further. It seems that these toner cartridges use chips to tell your pc that its running out each time you print.
Now, I'm not electronics guru, so I don't have a machine I can actually read the chip with, but I am under the impression that this chip also purposefully degrades the quality of your prints as it counts down your toner level. To test that theory I ordered some refill kits off of the web.
First thing I noticed after doing the chip replacement was that the quality of the prints immediately improved. I printed for several weeks, noticed the quality go down again, replaced the chip (no toner added in there yet...) and viola worked beautiful. When that chip said it was empty I opened the whole thing up again and took a look. This time it was indeed very low, but not empty. I poured in the new bottle of toner and put in a new chip and went back to work.
I usually order 3 chips for each bottle of toner I purchase . Currently I get about 4000 pages per bottle of toner. My refill purchases cost me $29 for two bottles of toner and six chips (on chip comes with each bottle and I add the other four to the order) Let's see$200 vs $29 for two 'cartridges' worth of prints... hmmm.... yeah I'll refill. Add to that the fact that the purchased carts don't get the same mileage as the refilled ones with extra chips to replace the old ones.
I guarantee I will never buy another 'rhymes with hell' printer again.
Caveat emptor indeed.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
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
- They sell more expensive ink that way.
- You'll notice your typical printing regimen uses much less yellow than the other shades, so if it's a trui-color cartridge, unless you're printing a lot of "skin tones", the yellow section will tend to still be mostly full when the other ones have run out, or at least "low".
- Many printers try to estimate the amount of ink used, but if you remove a print cartridge or reset the printer EROM, or the cartridge contacts get intermittent, many printers when they see a "unknown but used cartridge, assume it has unknown quantity and assume the worst.
- The printers with separate print heads and ink cartridges have a serious problem-- if the printhead runs out of ink the little teeasy tiny microscopic print head resistors blow out, requiring an expensive $40 printhead. On a HP D1xx printer, there are four of these. So the printer signals "ink low" when it's really probably still 1/3 full, just to protect the printheads.
- The printers with separate print heads and ink cartridges can get air-bubbles in the plumbing between ink cartridge and printhead if the ink runs low, leading to poor printing and printhead blowouts, so again they thy to err on the safe side.
Not very good reasons, but there they are...Back in 2002 I got a Lexmark laser printer in a going out of business sale. Since I got it, it had the low ink warning flashing. Only about 2 months ago did the actual ink start to fade, which prompted me to take out the drum, shake it, and everything was normal again.
When I was in college I was a computer lab assistant, which pretty much meant that I'm the go between for students and the printers. There were times that my supervisors were replacing the ink weekly when it wasn't necessary to do so. After a little research I found that there were page counters in the ink drums that triggered the low ink warnings, that typically triggered at 5000 pages. This might be accurate if you were printing 5000 pages of solid black ink, but when you are printing text documents you use much less ink. So just for fun I replaced a toner cartridge and ran 5000 blank pages through the printer, and sure enough the low ink warning came on.
Granted both cases are for 10 year old printers, now the newer ones have the digital display showing how full the ink is, and some even have the "window" to see if there is any color left. Back when I still used an ink jet I remember saving cartridges that only had one color that ran out and swap it when I was printing images that didn't use much of the missing color, just so I could use it up.
The rule of thumb should always be keep using the same ink until it actually runs out, or if it is a laser printer ignore the "life cycle" warning until it actually stops. I've been doing it this way for nearly 10 years and haven't had any problems.
I print about 20 pages a minute for the full 8 hours I'm at work and the 12 hours between the hours of 6pm and 6am.
i nk/0706output/
For how much you print, you might want to consider looking into a continuous ink feed system.
http://www.shutterbug.net/equipmentreviews/paper_
Though this wouldn't make sense for the average home user because they could ruin their printer from the inks drying out when they are letting their printer sit unused for weeks.
Now you've got me wondering if it's not so much a problem with the generic cartridges as some problem with the printer that makes it recognize the generics and not use them properly. *eyes printer suspiciously*
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Recently, Epson lost a lawsuit because their inkjets were causing users to waist an extreme amount of ink. If you own an Epson printer, you may be eligible to receive $50 in free ink -- more information at http://epsonsettlement.com/
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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All this talk about loss leaders makes me wonder how much an ink-jet printer really costs to build. It's really just a couple of stepping motors, a simple controller and a little bit of memory. Maybe I'm a crazy old geek but those components are just bigger, slower and cheaper versions of the parts that go into a hard drive (minus the platters). If I can buy an 80gb hard drive for ~$30, with its tight tolerances and fast transfer rate, then why should I be paying three times more for a big hunk of plastic that moves a little box of ink back and forth ? I could probably build one around a microcontroller and some SRAM, so what's with the ridiculous price tag ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.