Stink Over Ink

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday March 18, 2006

Nick Galvin

Readers are in a right flap over the high price of printer refills, writes Nick Galvin.

What is it with printers? If we had to choose a single class of device that gets people fired up enough to write to Troubleshooter, it would have to be printers.

Getting a particular printer to work under a particular operating system is a popular gripe, however, it's ink and ink usage that really annoys a lot of you - including Eric Steinhaus from Croydon, who is spitting chips over his Lexmark X7170, an all-in-one machine.

All was well when he bought the machine in June, however, problems arose when it came time to replace the ink cartridges. Steinhaus declined to stump up more than $80 for a pair of Lexmark-branded cartridges (about a third of the cost of the whole machine), and refilled them himself using a DIY kit from Calidad.

It worked for a while, then stopped, with the machine steadfastly telling him it was out of ink, despite the fact the cartridges were full. And there is nothing physically wrong with the refilled cartridges. "I found that I can continue to use the refilled cartridge using only the photocopier or when receiving faxes," says Steinhaus. "I have had a lot of correspondence with Lexmark and am furious that they can force you to buy their cartridges at exorbitant prices."

Steinhaus uses a G5 iMac and claims the driver software supplied with the X7170 doesn't have the ability to reset the cartridge by "telling" it it has been refilled. "The Macintosh solutions centre [in the driver] does not have an option to choose a used cartridge, where the PC version does," he adds.

We asked Lexmark to help out with the problem. The initial response was less than positive - unsurprisingly they are not at all keen on people refilling their cartridges at a fraction of the cost of buying a new Lexmark-branded cartridge.

"We certainly do not encourage it," says Lexmark's Michael Dunne. "But there is nothing in the cartridge or software to stop you doing it. There's nothing in the cartridge or driver that would prevent a refilled cartridge from being used."

"Great," we said, "so how do you do it?"

It was at this point that we struck a problem. Lexmark appeared incapable of telling us how this simple task could be accomplished. Despite repeated phone-calls and repeated assurances that it was possible, at the time of going to press we were still waiting for an explanation for how Steinhaus could accomplish this seemingly simple task.

Anybody out there with a possible solution?

Still on the subject of printers, Matthew Walker of Lindfield writes in response to Troubleshooter's story about colour ink disappearing despite the user printing only mono pages (It's All Black and White, Icon, February 25).

"To obtain the best optical density the darkest black text will have some colour ink added," he says. "This is called 'undercolour'. Printing greyscale should bypass the addition of under colour but, if it doesn't, look for a control called UCR (Undercolour Removal).

"Also the trade-off between fast drying ink and not clogging up the printhead nozzles dictates that the printhead nozzles have to be cleaned. As the nozzles and droplets get smaller (as in photo printers) they dry out easier and need more cleaning. Modern inkjets will use about 1/3 of their ink performing cleaning, even if you haven't used a particular colour it will still get cleaned."

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home