Dealing with Epson counters that shut off your printer.

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Remember when chips didn't exist on cartridges? Printers worked just fine and I never heard of anyone destroying a printer for lack of a chip counter.
As for all the warnings about ink filling the ink tanks and spilling over onto the furniture, I never heard of that happened either!

I have seen posts lately from printer guys saying they did a reset of their printers more than 3 times and after thousands more printed pages still have had no ink spills coming out of the bottom of their printers.

Many of the really old printers (we're talking back 8 years now) were more than capable of being reset 2 or 3 times without flooding but the margin for error was considerable back then with bags of excess capacity. Now with more and more functionality such as networking, wireless, etc... being squeezed into an ever shrinking printer box, that excess has been shaved back considerably and in many cases you're lucky if you can reset more than once before problems with ink backflow soiling the underside of printheads, or the movement of a printer resulting in excess ink finding a leak point.

Obviously I get to hear about this more because I'm selling the "really cool waste ink tanks" but to date I've had phone calls detailing ruined car seats (they were taking the printer to a service centre to be serviced after 3 resets), a ruined carpet (apparently the insurance excess was the cheapest cost with flowers, chocolates, etc... to placate the customers wife, much more expensive!) and the mundane stuff like gummed up printheads and ink puddles on desks.

Nope, No matter how they cut it, I see only one reason for chips that keep track of prints and that is to sell more printers and cartridges. They used to call that "Planned Obsolesce"

Agreed... The only reason we get so many new releases of printers is to provide updated firmware, disable compatibility with alternative consumables and pander to the "New toy" lusting that folks have. That's changing with things like the firmware update tool from Epson probably to reduce the tooling costs from all those new releases and to cut down on the number of lines being produced but any way you cut it a printer that works for more than 18 months is by most OEMs standards a printer that has been working too long.

 

[OutOFtheinkwell]

Lin!

Sorry man, I didn't mean to ignore your request for a picture of my RATF chip. Just been doing other things and haven't been reading the posts.
I do very much appreciate your offer to take a look at those chips but the fact is I already moved on to another procedure and those parts have been dumped.
Right now that 1400 is working using some Remanufactured OEM cartridges and I have a new RATF chip that I'm going to use with refillable dampers later on.
I agree that I just needed to move on as jtoolman said!
Here is a prediction for you. One day in the not too distant future we won't need to be concerned anymore by "counter chips". Happy Printing ! Outoftheinkwell!

 

[jtoolman]

OutOFtheinkwell, I think you are still miss labeling the programing that counts waste ink accumulation and shuts the printer down as a "Counter Chip".
It's not really a chip. It's programing within the Printer Firmware.
Without this system, thousands of unsuspecting printer owners would be having a heart attack when they saw a puddle of gooey back ink oozing out of their printer.
The only way to keep us from blindly printing and printing till the pads would overflow is the "Tough Love" practice currently being used.
But it's SO easy to work around that as we, the Informed know.
A symple waste ink bottle and an adjustment program to reset the waste ink counter back to ZERO both for the main purge unit and the overspray pads is all you need.

If the reference for counter chips is aimed at the smart chips that control our carts for ink level and or ink content then OK.
Here again I know dozens of printer owners that are pretty much clueless as too what any of this means and would unknowingly proceed to fry a Canon head in an instant simply from wating to continue to print after a card is deplared empty.
Epsons are a lot more forgiving, due to the drastically different head design. Thank God for that.
But the short story is, Chips are absolutely here to stay.

I am amazed, thrilled and gratefull of all thegreat efforts that the folks wuth the very brilliant minds that have cracked, produced resettable chips, resetters, auto reset chips, RATF chips and the miriad of refillable carts and CISS sytems, to permit ud to use 3rd party inks and carts.
Without any of these developments I would not be realistically doing much of the printing I am able to do today.

Ok that's my two cents,, maybe less.