The latest shout about how printers prematurely warn they're out of ink came this week from PC World magazine.
The basic premise isn't news, but the article is nonetheless a useful read.
For one thing, the author calculated the cost of a gallon of black ink at $4,731. No wonder printer manufacturers are motivated to make their customers buy more and more. In some of the tests, PC World found that printers "left more than 40 percent of their ink unused."
The tests were done on multifunction printers from Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Kodak. To keep things simple, only black ink consumption was measured.
When ink levels get low, a printer may do nothing, may warn you, and/or it may shut down to force you to change the ink cartridge. I'd avoid printers that shut themselves down. Unfortunately, this isn't an attribute of the printer that's likely to be mentioned on the box.
The tested printers from Canon, Epson, and Kodak shut down. Only the HP Photosmart C5280 did not. Thus, if you're in the market for a multifunction printer, the C5280 can save you lots of money in the long run.
Back in August, I blogged about a similar article on Slate, but for laser printers. That article had some tricks for faking out laser printers, so that you can actually use all the toner. As for faking out inkjet printers, it says:
These tricks generally apply to laser printers. It's more difficult to find ways to override ink-level sensors in an inkjet printer, and, at least according to printer manufactures, doing so is more dangerous...There are two reasons manufacturers make it more difficult for you to keep printing after your inkjet thinks it's out of ink. First, using an inkjet cartridge that's actually empty could overheat your printer's permanent print head, leaving you with a useless hunk of plastic. Second, the economics of the inkjet business are even more punishing than those of the laser business, with manufacturers making much more on ink supplies than they do on printers.
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Slate recently published a great article Take That, Stupid Printer! How to fight back against the lying, infuriating, evil ink-and-toner cabal by Farhad Manjoo. The title is a bit meaner than the article, which makes for interesting reading.
If you own a Brother HL-2040 printer, the article is especially relevant. The author suspected that the printer was lying about being out of toner and he figured out how to lie back to it, making it think there was a new cartridge. Sure enough the printer had lots of toner left, as Mr. Manjoo puts it "At least eight months have passed. I've printed hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade."
Brother is not the only company wringing profits out of way-too-early warnings out being out of ink/toner. The good news, according to the article is that "... instructions for fooling different laser printers into thinking you've installed a new cartridge are easy to come by ... If you're at all skilled at searching the Web, you can probably find out how to do it .... Just Google some combination of your printer's model number and the words toner, override, cheap, and perhaps lying bastards."
My HP LaserJet 1320 is well-mannered; it warns when it thinks the toner is running low, but doesn't do anything other than warn. And, it's reasonably accurate, giving me time to order a new cartridge before it really runs out of toner. Apparently, I'm lucky.
Or, it may be that the more expensive the printer is up-front, the less the manufacturer feels the need to play tricks with the ink/toner. If that appeals to you, see Kodak's consumer printers aim to chop ink costs.
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I hate installing printer drivers. For one thing, there is no standardization, each one seems to present a new option, question or issue. Then, there is all that extra software that comes with printer drivers, installing just the driver can be quite a battle.
So, when I had to print something recently and the only available printer was a Canon Bubble Jet model i320 that my laptop hadn't seen before, I cringed. Sure enough, it didn't go well.
At Canon's website, finding the Support section with drivers and downloads was easy, as was clicking on "Americas" and then "Canon U.S.A". But then nothing. My click was ignored. Click again. Still nothing. Click, click, click. Nothing, nothing nothing. Check the Internet connection, it's fine.
It turns out that Canon does not support Firefox, something they don't bother mentioning anywhere. Using Internet Explorer 6, the same click trail resulted in a new browser window opening for the U.S. support site. Firefox must have blocked the creation of the new browser window as part of it's anti-popup protection.
If Canon doesn't want to support Firefox, fine. But they should detect the browser (it's easy to do) and warn their customers to only use Internet Explorer.
The download instructions from Canon are:
1. Click the link, select "Save," specify "Save As," then click "Save" to download the file.
2. The downloaded file will be saved in the specified place in the self-extracting form (.exe format).
3. Double-click the downloaded EXE file to decompress it, then installation will start automatically.
Not hard. Not completely true either, as it turns out.
I saved the file (i320xp190usz.exe) to the root of the C disk and ran it from there. The resulting error is shown below.
In the screen shot it looks like I first clicked on the Unzip button, but that's not the case. As the instructions above say, the installation started automatically. The first step is an unzip to the folder that Canon pre-defined, in this case, folder dot-slash. The unzip operation found no folder named dot (or period if you prefer), tried to create it and failed.
After a few emotional moments (I really wanted to print something), I guessed at the problem. DOS and Linux users may know that ".." is a reference to a higher level directory. I guessed that the dot-slash was somehow related to this dot-dot, so I moved the i320xp190usz.exe file to a temporary subfolder and it ran fine from there.
Not that it mattered in the end, the printer only printed every other letter. The next day, I went out and bought a new printer. Canon was not on my shopping list. Three strikes and you're out.
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