Your inkjet printer lies to you
Inkjet printers are supposed to tell you when your ink cartridge is getting low. The problem is that you’ll likely be warned even when plenty of ink remains. I learned long ago to ignore the warnings and have gone on printing with my HP inkjet months after being told I was low on ink. A recent study that shows that warnings routinely occur with plenty of ink still left is reported at Ars Technica:
A new study says that on average, more than half of the ink from inkjet cartridges is wasted when users toss them in the garbage. Why is that interesting? According to the study, users are tossing the cartridges when their printers are telling them they’re out of ink, not when they necessarily are out of ink.
The study by TÃœV Rheinland looked at inkjet efficiency across multiple brands, including Epson (who commissioned the study), Lexmark, Canon, HP, Kodak, and Brother. They studied the efficiency of both single and multi-ink cartridges. Espon’s printers were among the highest rated, at more than 80 percent efficiency using single-ink cartridges. Kodak’s EasyShare 5300 was panned as the worst printer tested, wasting 64 percent of its ink in tests. TÃœV Rheinland measured cartridge weights before and after use, stopping use when printers reported that they were out of ink.
That’s the first problem. Printers routinely report that they are low on ink even when they aren’t, and in some cases there are still hundreds of pages worth of ink left.
The second issue is a familiar one: multi-ink cartridges can be rendered “empty” when only one color runs low. Multi-ink cartridges store three to five colors in a single cartridge. Printing too many photos from the air show will kill your cartridge faster than you can say “blue skies,” as dominant colors (say, “blue”) are used faster than the others. Therein lies the reason Epson backed the study: the company is singing the praises of its single-ink cartridge approach, an approach which is necessarily more efficient in terms of wasted ink because there’s only one color per cartridge, and thus only one cartridge to replace when that color runs out.
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