I love my Canon all-in-one inkjet printer, really I do!
I print in b&w easily 95% of the time, have two black cartridges, one super-sized. And yet, the three color cartridges plus the smallest black one tend to get “used up” in a month’s time! Okay, I thought, it’s evaporation or not turning off the printer at night, so I start doing that. Every night, plus when not in use. Jets sealed. There.
Ridiculously regularly, the colors still run out and Canon won’t allow me to print in b&w when my color cartridges are “low”. Wtf? It’s a scam. Clearly.
Is there such a company as one that doesn’t play this game? I want a useful all-in-one inkjet that doesn’t mysteriously siphon off unused colored ink plus will let me print in b&w when the colors are spent.
Every HP I’ve ever had has let me print in black when the color cartridge is low or empty. I also don’t think the color ink disappears or evaporates, it seems to last a reasonable amount of time.
The ink doesn’t evaporate. It’s even better than that! There is a pump in the printer that sucks it out of the cartridges regularly. Oh, sure, you need to do a little bit of that every so often so the nozzles don’t dry out, but the frequency and carelessness with which that pump is activated is the result of Canon knowing it makes it money.
(Note: I just spent a month playing around with a Canon printer in connection with inkjet printing of PCBs. I only print in black, because I’ve replaced the black cartridge with special ink, but all the other colors are already empty. I’m switching to a CISS for my experiments. Screw canon.)
And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. There is ample credible evidence that the major printer companies are chronic offenders of all sorts of dirty tricks like the one you’ve encountered. Grossly false “out of ink” indicators, print heads that deliberately waste ink during mandatory “print head cleaning” and “alignment checks”, … even print cartridges with timed kill switches to name a few.
My mother currently has an hp, I have a Lexmark. Both whine frequently that “the color cartridge is low” but you tell them “yeah yeah” and they print.
The hp seems to have missed noticing one of the cartridge changes, it’s been whining since the second time we needed to change black cartridges: I figured that, since we’d printed a ton of color pictures, the color cartridge would need changing soon, so I changed both. It’s been saying “low color cartridge” since two printouts after that, but like I said all it means is an extra mouse click on the “yes honey” button.
My HP D7260 manifestly refused to do this, which was quite irritating–I was heading off to a meeting and wanted to print off the directions (black and white) but the red ink cartridge was low and it just completely refused to print.
Whoops, I mixed up the makes. I own an Epson. That study, comissioned by Epson, paints them as good. And indeed, it is honest about reporting when an ink cartridge is low. (You can verify this because the cartridge is translucent and visibly empty.) But it is that same Epson that turns on the ink-sucking pump several times a day, instead of once every week, emptying out the cartridges when no color inks are being used.
The only technology that doesn’t screw you over with proprietary inks/toners is dot-matrix. Yup. Ribbons are cheap, interchangeable commodities. That’s why you’ll still see dot-matrix printers being used.
Other than that, just buy off-brand ink/toner. Or get a continuous ink supply system. Sure, you screw over the printer manufacturers who sold you your $50 printer at a $200 loss. But fuck em!
Yeah… you’re pretty much going to get screwed when it comes to any desktop printer.
The big multifunction printers/copiers/scanners for business use are a different matter, as are (in my experience) the large format inkjets used by print shops and engineering/architectural firms.
As I understood it, most printers that use ink TANKS feeding into a common printhead, will give you some sort of grief over the color ink running out before the black ink; while printers that use ink CARTRIDGES with a built-in printhead for each cartridge will usually be more tolerant (but the cartridge will be proportionately more expensive). With both honorable and shameful exceptions, of course. The tank-based printers will want to keep the pump primed, and the schedule on which they do it takes the business model of the 3month/3,000-mile oil change joints to a different dimension of enthusiastic overexpenditure.
And if “one ink tank out” errors are bad, wait 'til you get a printer refusing to run because the waste-ink sponge is saturated out. That one’s a beaut.
Another thing that happens with some color printers is that in order to make their black text in the “normal” or “best” mode, they supplement the main pigment-black ink with an overspray of the color inks and the dye-black "photo-black’ ink, if they have that. So that all but the crappiest B/W draft-mode print does use the whole set of inks.
And yes, the chipped cartridges, be it for kill date or for refusing to recognize a refill, are particularly annoying.
Basically from the POV of the printer makers, if we just want to print a whole lot of B/W text, we should get ourselves a laser printer.
Of course, any business model wherein you sell the base unit nearly or actually at a loss in order to make your cash on selling the expendables will lead to a perverse incentive to make you buy a LOT of expendables . . .
Best thing I ever did was get rid of my inkjet (went through 5) and get a low end laser. (Brother - HL 2040, under $100) It works flawlessly and the cartrige that came with it will print 1600 pages before I need to replace it. I rarely need color prints and if I do I’ll go to Kinko’s. I will never ever again buy another inkjet printer.
I’ve got a Canon that’ll let me print even if the color is out (sometimes I have to hit the ‘resume’ button, but that’s no biggie). It’s a Canon ip3500. I’m pretty sure it’s discontinued, but you should be able to find them still.
Every printer I have ever had has let me print, even after the device said it was low.
Also, it always seems that the low ink thing is handled by the driver, not the printer. And you’d be surprised at how many printers are backwards compatible with older drivers.
Plus, if you don’t like being screwed by proprietary companies, using Linux is always a choice. Rarely do the companies make the printer drivers themselves. And, even when they do, if they do something people don’t like, someone will make a new one.
I personally find the hassle of Linux too much, but that’s only because I like to install a bunch of Window applications (i.e. games.) And you always have to fidget to get them working on Linux.
I used to have a Canon S820 - one of those printers with the six indivdual ink cartridges. I was always running out of one color or another and didn’t have a spare handy, and the printer wouldn’t let me print if a cartridge was empty. I eventually discovered that there was an option in the print driver for “Print Grayscale” which would only use the black cartridge and would let me print if a color cartridge was empty.
Most printer lines aimed at home users have a razor-blade type business model. They sell printers close to cost and make all their profit on expensive proprietary ink refills, just as Gillette sells cheap razor handles and expensive proprietary blade refills. That gives them an incentive to charge high prices for tiny amounts of ink and not much incentive to fix “bugs” that make it seem like the cartridge is empty when it’s not.
I don’t know for sure but it sounds to me like you may be happier with a product from a manufacturer with the opposite business model (expensive printer and cheap ink), as Balthisar suggests. As of a few years ago, consumer printers from Kodak followed this model. I haven’t kept up with developments there, so that may have changed.
Ironically, I usually print grayscale from colored sources in order to save ink. But since it’s apparently not the rare use of color ink that’s depleting the cartridges, your suggestion just might be the solution. Next time it won’t let me print b&w because the color cartridges are low, I’ll try setting grayscale as default.