- Joined
- Feb 24, 2005
- Messages
- 1,669
- Reaction score
- 182
- Points
- 223
- Location
- North of Boston, USA
- Printer Model
- Canon i9900 (plus 5 spares)
Since I am about to switch inks and completely purge all of my carts, I thought that this would be a good time to see what happens if you ignore the "Low Ink" warning and just continue to print. I have now done this on 3 carts, and can report that the printer definitely gives an "Ink Out!" message and refuses to print a short time later (when the printer calculates that the sponge is getting too empty?). I got 4 extra 8x10s after the PM went low, 6 when the yellow went low, and 7 when the cyan went low. The PM and yellow carts are shown below.
It can be seen that this procedure is effective at getting most of the ink out of the cart. In all 3 cases, there was no noticeable change in the print quality between the "low" and "empty" messages. There was also no change in the print quality after the yellow or cyan carts were changed, but there was light banding for the first 2 pages after the PM cart was changed, but it cleared up without any additional cleaning cycles.
If I was buying OEM or 3rd party prefilled carts and discarding them when they empty, I would definitely experiment with printing until the printer refused to print, and then change every cart that is either "low" or almost empty at that time. Getting 8% more prints from a cart is the same as saving $1.00 per cart on OEM carts. Every time even one cart is changed every cart in the printer gets an extended cleaning cycle, so it makes sense to change every cart that will soon be empty at the same time to minimize the ink lost due to the extra cleaning cycles.
It can be seen that this procedure is effective at getting most of the ink out of the cart. In all 3 cases, there was no noticeable change in the print quality between the "low" and "empty" messages. There was also no change in the print quality after the yellow or cyan carts were changed, but there was light banding for the first 2 pages after the PM cart was changed, but it cleared up without any additional cleaning cycles.
If I was buying OEM or 3rd party prefilled carts and discarding them when they empty, I would definitely experiment with printing until the printer refused to print, and then change every cart that is either "low" or almost empty at that time. Getting 8% more prints from a cart is the same as saving $1.00 per cart on OEM carts. Every time even one cart is changed every cart in the printer gets an extended cleaning cycle, so it makes sense to change every cart that will soon be empty at the same time to minimize the ink lost due to the extra cleaning cycles.
