I have this nifty-as-shit combination printer/faxer/copier/scanner. It’s the bee’s knees.
Being an inkjet, it has those exorbitantly priced microchip-enhanced plastic thimble-fulls of ink that hold three drops and are good for printing perhaps one tenth of a page. But I knew that. It’s OK. I’m a total Digital Ninja and hardly ever print anything, anyway.
So here’s what’s stupid. If a cartridge is empty, a little light on the front panel goes on and blinks at you angrily, and you can’t print until it’s replaced. But as it turns out, you also can’t scan. Yes, that’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The damn thing won’t do anything until you replace that cartridge. All I wanted to do was scan some Important Documents before Monday. So, I had to ruin my relaxing weekend by trudging down to the OfficeMax and making the surly ink lady fetch me a new Magenta. (This shit is so valuable they keep it behind the counter now.)
Ooh, I feel your pain. I bought a four-in-one machine and was so happy that each color ink was in a separate cartridge–no more buying an expensive three-color cartridge simply because I ran out of cyan!!
Except NOW if I’m out of any one color, the damn thing won’t print ANYTHING–not even in black, on the grayscale setting.
Not to mention the fact that as soon as I bought the printer, my local WalMart promptly phased out that particular brand of ink. Grrrrrr…
We had an Brother color fax machine. It had four cartridges. One black, three colors. I don’t remember how often it did it, but here and there it would print out some sort of test pattern, to keep the nozzles clear. If any one of the inks ran out, it would not print anything at all. We NEVER received color faxes. It pissed me off to no end that if yellow (or either of the other colors) ran out, it would hold all the faxes in memory until I could get to the store to buy a new cartridge. I called Brother, they told me that’s how it’s supposed to work. I told them how disappointed I was that I had to spend so much money to keep this thing working. They didn’t seem to care. I called the BBB and complained about it. Brother sent me a new black and white fax machine.
Mine (Epson) does the same “Won’t print anything if out of color” trick. Even if I set it to grayscale/B&W.
For the cost of three more color cartirdges for Red/Yellow/Cyan, I might as well dump this thing in a ditch and buy a new B&W only printer. We have a color photo printer if I ever really need to print color anyway.
Hrmph. Well, after I had bought three new ink cartridges for backups for my Epson, I accidentally knocked over a glass of water and baptised the damn thing. It’s dead.
The End.
Well the good news is you can get a really good B&W laser printer for less than a hundred bucks now. I’ve been using mine for two years on the free half-filled toner cartridge they give you when you buy the thing.
Our Samsung ML-2010 cost $50, and while replacement cartridges are about $70 each, this is still far cheaper, on a cost-per-page basis, than our crappy old inkjet. Also dramatically faster, at 18-22 ppm.
We virtually never need to do color printing—virtually all our printing is plain old text documents—and when we do it’s easier to go up to campus or to Kinko’s than to deal with the hassle and waste and frustration of running a color inkjet. The inkjet printer industry is little more than organized crime.
And even color lasers have come down dramatically in price over the past few years.
The stupidest part of my last inkjet printer was that when the cartridges needed replacing, they would hide behind the cowling when I opened the lid to get them out - I had to haul them out manually, by yanking on the track they run on. I’m fairly sure that wasn’t exactly good for the mechanisms (but since inkjets are pretty much disposable, it doesn’t matter much).
(I used to be able to fool my printer and get more documents out of the cartridge when it said it was out of black - I’d change my print colour on the page to dark blue and print away! Good enough for rough drafts, etc.)
If you are even reasonably coordinated you can refill your ink cartridges.
I have been refilling my various printers for over 10 years.
They sell self resetting chipped cartridges for the nastier brands of printers.
Google Inkjet refill kit and your model of printer.
The bulk ink costs about 1/50th of the stuff in stores.
They have different inks for different printers and also generic ink that works in all printers.
I have never had a print head failure until my son decided to wash the print head out under water. (They don’t like that much)
