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

[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?

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)

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 ??? wtf
The costs of ink because of this cleaning are simply HUGE -

-tomos (August 07, 2008, 02:21 AM)

[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. 

[cranioscopical]

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

-Armando (August 30, 2008, 10:45 PM)

Don't those make great little personal printers, if you want a monochrome laser?

I bought one for my wife a year or so ago and can't fault it.

Here, in Canada, Staples is selling them for just under $60 which is quite a bargain.
I could buy about three of them for the cost of the toner cartridge in my H-P mono laser.

[Armando]

I agree! And refilling the cartridge (toner from ebay) is very easy. Cheap printer that works very well.

[J-Mac]

Don't get me wrong - I really love the Canon PIXMA MP830. Best color photos I have ever printed. Easy and fast duplex printing - both side of the paper. Automatic Document Feeder that takes about 20 - 25 sheets. And the Canon ink is relatively inexpensive.

Just hate it when it doesn't recognize a new cartridge!

Jim

BTW - The forum looks all wonky again today. Something bad in my cache? Of is the forum having some appearance issues?

[tomos]

Don't get me wrong - I really love the Canon PIXMA MP830. Best color photos I have ever printed. Easy and fast duplex printing - both side of the paper. Automatic Document Feeder that takes about 20 - 25 sheets. And the Canon ink is relatively inexpensive.

Just hate it when it doesn't recognize a new cartridge!

-J-Mac (August 31, 2008, 11:57 AM)

that's ridiculous, esp at the price of canon inks

I have a Canon iP6600D photo printer, I actually use substitute inks (but I researched & got good quality ones)
but point is it was a pain at first cause I had to take the chips from the canon cartridge & add it to the replacement* - then what happens is it's not recognised - like the canon ones you're talking about.
But, at this stage you have the option to disable ink checking and you can then use your "dud" cartridges -  as I say, if you're willing to sacrifice the ink-checking
They dont advertise this & it seemed to have worked slightly differently for different cartridges iirc & to be honest I cant remember what exactly has to be done (only had to do it once for each colour) but sure you could find out easy enough.

p.s. forum looks fine here

* JetTec & KMP inks no longer require this

[J-Mac]

Thanks Tom.

Ahh, I killed my cache again. Seems like I have to do this a few times a day, but only for DonationCoder. Weird!

As for the Canon inks, I get them very reasonably at Amazon - multi-paks. Better than the HP cartridges I used to purchase. I print a LOT of hi-res photos and actually find that using the Canon PIXMA ink and Canon Pro photo paper gets me the best results. YMMV, I guess.

Jim

[steeladept]

Personally I have a Okidata personal color laser (Actually I believe it is an LED printer, but it is effectively the same) I bought about 5 years ago for about $500 USD.  It has been awesome.  My wife and I used it throughout our Masters Degrees (we both went at the same time), and she has been using it for her job from home ever since.  Her company pays for the black ink and I think in all that time we have only gone through 3 full Black toner cartridges and the color cartridges that came with the printer finally gave out about a year ago.  Given how much we print color now, it is no big deal, we haven't replaced them yet.  Still it prints fine and if we attempt color prints, it still attempt it just fine (though it isn't really readable).  If anyone cares, it is an Okidata 5150c. 

BTW:  It doesn't do the best photos I have seen, though it certainly does the best ones for a non-photo laser printer I have ever seen.  In fact it probably rivals some low quality photo ink-jet printers and does significantly better than most on plain paper.  This is due to the wax content of the toner giving the finished product a sheen that is like a low grade photo paper output.