Once again your printer is out of ink way before you think there is any way it should be. Yet somehow, BOOM. It just refuses to print another page until you replace the cartridge. Well, when Farhad Manjoo’s Brother printer suddenly stopped printing; he started to wonder if his printer wasn’t simply lying to him that it was out of toner just so he would buy more before he actually even needed it. His prints hadn’t been fading at all; his printer just suddenly simply refused to keep going without a new cartridge.
Manjoo decided to look to the ‘Net for a way around this. And he indeed found some answers. He learned that by covering up the sides of his toner cartridge with a piece of electrical tape he could “trick” his printer into thinking it was full. He says the printer was been chugging along just fine ever since...eight months and hundreds of pages down the road...printing out perfect pages.
It’s not just Manjoo this had happened to, the whole “you don’t really need a new cartridge but your printer tells you that you do” bit. The problem is actually becoming so widespread that there have actually been class action lawsuits filed against Epson and Hewlett-Packard over the trickery. It seems this is even more common for inkjets than laser printers...because inkjets make their money off, guess what? The ink.
There are many ways to get extra life out of your printer ink or toner, from the standard “shake the heck out of it” approach, to finding the options in your menus that will override “cartridge check” features. In his Slate article though, Manjoo suggests a web search for specific advice, since there are just so many kinds of printers out there. He suggests looking up the model of your printer along with words like toner, override, cheap, and perhaps lying bastards. Although if that fails, FixYourOwnPrinter is a pretty good place to start.
Read [Slate]
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