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Take That Stupid Printer -- Stop Tricking Me Into Wasting Ink!

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mouser:
I have a brother laser printer and love it.. but it looks like next time it tells me it's out of ink i might just have to stage an intervention..

I bought a cheap laser printer a couple years ago, and for a while, it worked perfectly. The printer, a Brother HL-2040, was fast, quiet, and produced sheet after sheet of top-quality prints—until one day last year, when it suddenly stopped working. I consulted the user manual and discovered that the printer thought its toner cartridge was empty. It refused to print a thing until I replaced the cartridge. But I'm a toner miser: For as long as I've been using laser printers, it's been my policy to switch to a new cartridge at the last possible moment, when my printouts get as faint as archival copies of the Declaration of Independence. But my printer's pages hadn't been fading at all. Did it really need new toner—or was my printer lying to me?

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http://www.slate.com/id/2198316/




from www.boingboing.net

mnemonic:
Yep, exactly the same thing here - I've got a Minolta Magicolor 2350 and one day, without warning, it told me that one of the toner cartridges needed replacing even though the print quaility of that colour had not reduced.  Looking on fixyourprinter.com suggested that there was a fuse inside the cartridge that needed replacing and the toner would come magically back to life...

tomos:
I have a brother laser printer and love it.. but it looks like next time it tells me it's out of ink i might just have to stage an intervention..
-mouser (August 22, 2008, 06:31 PM)
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I think Brother are getting a bad attitude (maybe others too..)

I've had a Brother 1250 laser for over 5 years - it never did anything silly like that
and,
(as posted elsewhere), I recently had contact with very bad Brother inkjet experience:

I wanted to post about a Brother printer/Multifunktiongerät (all-in-one)
Specifically the DCP 130C but I suspect all Brother inkjets may be like this:-
-
They do automatic printhead cleaning every two days, not only that, they do it whether you print or not - if you're using the printer you dont need "cleaning", and, every two days ??? :huh: wtf :)
The costs of ink because of this cleaning are simply HUGE -
-tomos (August 07, 2008, 02:21 AM)
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J-Mac:
I use a Canon All-In-One - the PIXMA MP830 - and it truly is the best all-around printer/scanner that I have owned.  And this after 11 straight HP's. It uses five separate ink tanks (inkjet) and the printer pops up a warning when one needs to be replaced, which is a nice feature. Except that it does this long before the ink cartridge will actually run out of ink. The good part is that you can just ignore the pop-up, or close it, and continue printing until you wish. I used to change them as soon as the warning hit - the HP's I had used previously were a bit more accurate with their ink warnings. But you can usually print on the Canon for a solid week past the warnings if you are printing mostly text pages. I guess I can understand why the warning starts so early: If you are printing very high-resolution images - like large photos - the tank really could get low enough to distort the photo's colors, which would waste that photo paper and the ink from the other cartridges that went into that unfinished photo. But I was tossing cartridges that had a good week or more of printing left in them.

One other thing that plagues the Canon PIXMA printers that is much more annoying and frustrating is that sometimes after you put a brand new cartridge in the printer will not print and claims that you removed a cartridge and did not replace it with a new one. It actually can't read the new cartridge and refuses to try without another cartridge being inserted.  Which leads to a shelf full of new cartridges that won't work!

Canon claims that they will replace such cartridges but only if you send in diagnostic logs, proof of purchase, and a few other bits of documentation. Much more trouble than it is worth sometimes. (I couldn't always find everything they wanted, and I really don't wish to set up yet another tracking system at home for something stupid like "Ink Documentation". (Honest, it IS my ink cartridge!  See...  It has my nose!)

Jim

Armando:
My cheap samsung ML-2010 prints until I can barely read what's printed.  ;)

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