Our lying printer

A few months back, we bought a new Canon inkjet printer. We’d been fairly unhappy with the old one, but the final straw was when it ran out of ink in all five cartridges simultaneously. We added up the cost of replacing them and recoiled in horror. Then we realized that by throwing in another few euros, we could just get a new printer.

Enter the shiny new Canon MG6150. It did everything we needed, for about two months. Then it stopped printing. The error message informed us that the main black ink cartridge was empty, and there would be no printing whatsoever until we’d bought a new one.

Disgusted, I started doing research. And the first thing I learned was that our printer was lying to us.

Ink sales are a huge moneymaker, not just for printer manufacturers but also for third-party companies specializing in compatible refills. The ink itself is cheap to manufacture, and yet, according to PC World:

An average black-ink cartridge contains 8 milliliters of ink and costs about $10 which translates into a cost of $1.25 per milliliter (or more horrifyingly, $1250 per liter).

(Note: the quoted article is three years old; the cost has gone up since then. And here in Europe, with the VAT, it’s even more expensive.)

If you’re a manufacturing company making great profits on a cheap product with a huge markup, what’s your next step? Selling even more of that product. How do you do that? 1) Tell your customers that they need it, even when they don’t, and 2) prevent them from using their printers until they go out and get it. A total halt to productivity makes for great incentive.

Most of us are pretty sure that our ink cartridges aren’t really empty when the printer says they are. We suspect we’re being scammed but can’t prove it. PC World set out to find that proof with a little old-fashioned empirical testing.

PC World Test Center results show that models from Canon, Epson, and Kodak reported ink cartridges as being empty when in some cases the tanks had 40 percent of their black ink remaining.

The quantity of unused ink ranged from about 8 percent in an Epson-brand cartridge to a whopping 45 percent in an aftermarket cartridge for a Canon printer.

So, now we know we’re being scammed. And those of us with an environmental bent are also fairly pissed off about the waste. But what can we do, when the printer locks up due to the “out of ink” message?

We can reset the chip.

Ink cartridge chips are the latest tool used by printer manufacturers to make sure that customers can’t override the low ink warning. The tiny electronic chips monitor ink usage, or, in many cases, simply count pages. Once the predefined threshold of a chip is passed, it will lock up the printer. The warning cannot be overridden.

But it turns out that there is a whole community of irritated printer owners who do not like being scammed. They have started up companies catering to other irritated printer owners, and one of the things they do is take ink cartridges and reverse engineer the chips. Then they build inexpensive “chip resetters” that exist for one purpose only: to reset the chip’s page count or ink level usage to zero.

I ordered a chip resetter from Octoinkjet, and raced to the printer the moment it arrived. It took me about twenty seconds to remove the inkjet cartridge, slip it into the chip resetter, pull it back out and return it to the printer. Immediately, the printer registered a full ink level.

So far, we’ve printed more than 60 pages of dense text and images with our “empty” ink cartridge. I’m watching carefully, ready to pull the cartridge the moment the text starts looking light (because you don’t want the ink to run out or nasty things happen to the print head), but so far it’s quite happy. When it really does run low, I’m ready to refill it myself, having bought those materials as well. To heck with being victimized!

My chip resetter cost €23. A new large black ink cartridge from our local Staples costs €16. In another usage or two, the resetter will have paid for itself — and both my magenta and cyan cartridges are already saying they’re low.

But I know they’re lying.

UPDATE 30 SEPT:

Martin Smallridge, the owner of Octoinkjet (where I bought my chip resetter and refilling supplies), has weighed in with a more nuanced explanation of what the chips do and why you don’t want to keep printing until your ink runs out. I may have brushed over that part too lightly — when I wrote “nasty things happen to the print head,” I probably should have added “and then your printer becomes a bibelot.” Which is why I’m watching mine so closely. I’d have refilled the black cartridge right away, but since I am replacing it with a previous model cartridge (which has a transparent section making it much easier to refill, as opposed to the opaque plastic of the current model), I want to use up as much ink as I can without endangering the printer.

For more on this, please check out Martin’s comment below. I will just add that I believe a manufacturer’s claim that the extra ink in an “empty” cartridge is really for the protection of the printer when that extra ink amounts to 8%, as in the Epson example in PC World’s tests. When the extra amounts to 40%, then I’m not buying the excuse. That’s not protection, that’s a scam.

But it is definitely better to be safe than sorry, so unless you’re refilling, use a chip resetter with extreme caution.