HOW MUCH INK IS LEFT IN THAT DEAD CARTRIDGE ?

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http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/152953/how_much_ink_is_left_in_that_dead_cartridge.html
How Much Ink Is Left in That Dead Cartridge?
You’ve
probably had this experience: Your printer tells you it’s time to
change the cartridge, but you dismiss the message and keep printing.
Days or weeks later, you’re still using the same cartridge and thinking
to yourself that rumors of its death were greatly exaggerated.Or
perhaps your printer simply shuts down when it decides you’ve gone deep
enough into its ink well, refusing to operate until you replace the
cartridge, though you suspect there’s plenty of ink left.PC World
decided to do some real lab testing on this issue; and the results
confirm what you may have suspected: Many manufacturer-branded (OEM)
and third-party (aftermarket) vendor cartridges leave a startling
amount of ink unused when they read empty. In fact, some inkjet
printers force users to replace black ink cartridges when the cartridge
is nearly half full, PC World has found.

Overview
We tested
using multifunction printers from four major manufacturers: Canon,
Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Kodak. (For the top-rated models, see our
chart of top-rated multifunction printers.) 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. After posting low-ink
warnings, those printers wouldn’t let us resume printing until we
inserted a new cartridge.Our test printers typically left more unused
ink–in some cases significantly more–when using third-party or
aftermarket print cartridges than when using the printer manufacturer’s
own cartridges.

When using ink their own manufacturer’s
cartridges, the printers displayed several low-ink warning messages
before finally shutting down due to low ink. Our HP printer, the
Photosmart C5280, was the only one that continued to print even after
displaying several low-ink messages, and those messages appeared only
when we used an HP print cartridge. When we paired the C5280 with an
aftermarket cartridge from LD Products, the printer provided no low-ink
warning at all.It’s important to note that our results show the
performance of a clutch of single printers, each paired with just one
cartridge. Since OEMs and their aftermarket competitors sell dozens of
ink cartridges for a wide variety of printer models, you should
consider our results as a kind of snapshot of the way each particular
unit deals with “remaining ink.”

Why So Much Leftover Ink?
There
are valid reasons for not draining an ink cartridge completely,
printing experts say. “Many inks, if they run dry, can cause
significant damage to the printer,” says Brian Hilton, a senior staff
engineer at the Rochester Institute of Technology who holds 29 inkjet
patents. “You always want to leave a buffer in the tank so that the
printer never runs dry. There should always be a factor of safety
included.”Other observers point out that the quantity of leftover ink
is often only a few milliliters. “Printers have generally become more
efficient over the years,” says Andy Lippman, a printing analyst with
Lyra Research. “In the past, you might have seen 40 milliliters of ink
in the black cartridge. Today you’re going to get the same amount of
pages out of 7 or 8 milliliters.”Other people, however–both
journalists and independent researchers–have reported very different
experiences with ink cartridges. Judging from these findings, printer
owners are probably throwing away a lot of usable ink. And that’s a
problem, when you consider how expensive the precious fluid is. 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).
Liquid Gold?

If you bought a
gallon of the stuff over the life of your printer, you’d have paid
about $4731 for a liquid that one aftermarket vendor told us was
“cheap” to make. For some perspective, gasoline costs about $3 per
gallon (at the moment), while a gallon of Beluga caviar (imagined as a
liquid) costs about $18,000–surprisingly, only about four times as
expensive as good old printer ink.”I personally think that consumers
are getting ripped off,” says Steve Pociask, president of the American
Consumer Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute in
Washington, D.C. Pociask recently coauthored a 50-page study on the ink
jet printer and cartridge market. “In some cases, we found that [the
price of] the printer could be 1/8 of the total cost of printing,” says
Pociask. “Over the life of the printer–and by that I mean three
years–you can easily spend $800 for the printer and ink.”

How We Tested
We
researched both online and brick-and-mortar tech outlets to find
printers that are being used now by high numbers of consumers. We
didn’t test color inks because that would have introduced too many
variables that might skew the results. For instance, some printers use
separate cartridges for each ink, while others use single, tricolor
cartridges. A standardized test might not drain the colors evenly,
which might give one printer an unfair advantage.Tony Leung,
Senior Data Analyst in the PC World Test Center, weighed each black ink
cartridge (to an accuracy of 0.001 gram) to determine the cartridge’s
initial weight. We then printed pages until the printer, in response to
the low level of ink in the cartridge, prevented us from
continuing.When each printer stopped printing, we removed and weighed
its black ink cartridge to determine the cartridge’s out-of-ink weight.
Then we removed all of the remaining ink from the cartridge (including
the small sponges found in some cartridges), put the cartridge on the
scale again, and measured it’s true-empty weight.This method allowed us
to identify the weight of the ink when the cartridge was full, when the
printer announced that it was empty, and when it truly was empty.

Using this method, here’s what we found.
We
tested Canon’s Pixma MP610 multifunction printer with black ink
cartridges from Canon and from G&G, an aftermarket brand owned by
Ninestar Image. The differences in performance between the OEM ink and
the aftermarket ink were striking. With the Canon cartridge installed,
the printer stopped printing when 24 percent of the ink remained in the
tank. Specifically, the full tank of ink weighed 27.333 grams, and the
unused ink in the tank at nominal empty weighed 6.459 grams.Canon
didn’t dispute our results, but the company pointed out that its
printers do allow users to print after the initial low-ink warning.
“There are typically a series of warnings before the ink is out,
alerting users to ink status,” spokesperson Kevin McCarthy wrote in an
e-mail message. (We calculated the remaining ink weight at the point
when the printer actually shut down, which was after the preliminary
warnings appeared.)

When equipped with the aftermarket G&G
cartridge, the Canon printer shut down with nearly 45 percent of the
ink left. The full tank of ink weighed 27.320 grams, and its remaining
ink weighed 12.277 grams.G&G responded by running its own tests
with a different Canon printer, the Pixma iX4000. (The vendor says the
model that the PC World Test Center used wasn’t available in its
workshop at the time of testing.)G&G told us that it tested three
of its color cartridges–magenta, blue, and yellow–and found that the
amount of residual ink ranged from 5.5 percent (for yellow) to 17
percent (for magenta). (Again, PC World limited its testing to black
ink cartridges only.) Canon declined to comment on our test findings
with the G&G print cartridge.

Epson
With an Epson
black-ink cartridge installed, the Epson RX680 printer shut down with
just over 8 percent of its ink remaining. The weight of the ink in the
full cartridge was 11.700 grams; the weight of the residual ink at
printer shutdown was 0.969 gram. In an e-mail response to PC World, an
Epson spokesperson wrote: “Eight percent remaining ink measured in your
testing is a normal amount. This reserve assures print quality and
printer reliability.”But the story was quite different when we printed
pages on the RX680 using an aftermarket cartridge from LD Products.
This time the printer shut down with a whopping 41 percent of the ink
still in the tank. The full quantity of ink weighed 12.293 grams; the
unused ink weighed 5.0005 grams.Why the huge gap between OEM and
aftermarket? “Epson cartridges have an ink-level sensor to more
accurately report ink levels, and to reduce the amount of ink in the
safety reserve,” the company spokesperson wrote. Third-party products
don’t have these sensors, according to Epson, and the printer
manufacturer “cannot guarantee the performance, quality or longevity of
these cartridges.”

LD Products has a different theory. “The ink
itself is cheap, so we refill to more than the original level,” says
Ben Chafetz, vice president of marketing for LD Products. The Epson
printer bases its low-ink message on the printing capacity of the OEM
cartridge, but since the LD cartridge contains considerably more ink
than the OEM version, it is bound to have more ink remaining when the
printer shuts down, according to Chafetz. In other words, if Epson
supplies enough ink in its cartridge for 120 pages plus a margin of
error, say, while LD adds enough ink to print 200 pages, and if the
Epson printer shuts off at 120 pages anyway, the percentage of leftover
ink in the LD cartridge will be considerably higher than in the Epson
cartridge.Chafetz points out that regardless of the percentage of
unused (and unusable) ink in the nominally empty cartridges, the page
yields of the LD Products cartridges and the high-capacity Epson
cartridges should be the same.

Hewlett-Packard
Testing the
HP printer was difficult because HP takes an unusual approach toward
diminishing ink supplies in its cartridges: The HP Photosmart C5280
multifunction printer we tested didn’t shut down as ink levels
approached exhaustion. With an OEM cartridge installed, the printer
displayed warning messages as the ink level dropped, but it never
forced us to replace the cartridge.As a result, we continued printing
until the pages began showing telltale signs of low ink, such as banded
text. The HP printer will continue to print until the cartridge is
completely dry–but since the print heads are part of the cartridge in
HP’s design, running out of ink does not damage other parts of the
printer.When using an aftermarket cartridge from LD Products, the C5280
failed to post any low-ink warnings–either on our test computer or on
the printer console. Does that mean HP’s warning system works only with
house-brand cartridges? Not necessarily, but HP suggests that you are
better off with its OEM cartridges. “Most aftermarket cartridges do not
signal ‘low-on-ink’ alerts, giving customers no advance warning that
ink is running low,” wrote HP spokesperson Katie Neal in an e-mail
message.

LD Products’ Chafetz disagrees. He says that LD’s
Photosmart C5280-compatible products are actually refurbished and
refilled HP cartridges. One possible explanation for the lack of a
low-ink warning is that the printer wasn’t reading the refurbished
cartridge’s chip code correctly, he says.Chafetz says that the results
from PC World’s tests mark the first time that LD Products’ technicians
have heard of their cartridges’ not posting a low-ink warning.
Kodak

The
Kodak EasyShare 5300 was the only printer that lasted longer with an
aftermarket cartridge than it did with the manufacturer’s cartridge.
Equipped with a Kodak cartridge, this printer shut down with 43 percent
of the ink remaining. Its full quantity of ink weighed 16.857 grams,
and its unused ink after shutdown weighed 7.272 grams.Kodak doesn’t
dispute our findings, but the company argues that our results don’t
tell the whole story. Roderick Eslinger, Kodak technical marketing
manager, says that Kodak’s in-house tests in 2007 indicated that 65
percent of its cartridge ink was used for consumer printing, while 35
percent was used to “protect/maintain optimal Kodak printer performance
and document quality.” Eslinger says that the remaining ink is “already
factored into our industry advertising claims for consumers, and that
Kodak cartridges offer “low costs and high quality yields as compared
to competitors.”With a G&G cartridge, the Kodak printer shut down
with 36 percent of the ink remaining in the tank. The leftover ink
weighed 5.360 grams. Kodak chose not to comment on the aftermarket
results.

Watch the Page Yield
Some vendors and analysts
advise consumers to make sure that they get the correct page yield (the
total number of pages produced with a single cartridge), rather than
focusing on the amount of ink left unused in a cartridge that must be
discarded. “This is the most reliable way to understand the life of a
cartridge, rather than the amount of ink, or what might be left over,”
says Lippman.

But vendor page-yield estimates don’t always match
reality, as we discovered when testing printers for another PC World
article, “Cheap Ink: Will It Cost You?” Using a different set of OEM
cartridges and printers, we found that one HP black cartridge exceed
its projected page yield (810 printed vs. 660 projected), while page
yields from Epson and Kodak cartridges fell short of expectations.
Specifically, Epson printed just 209 pages, far less than the 335 pages
the company estimated it would produce; and Kodak generated 480 pages
versus a projected page count of 540. Page yields aside, we have yet to
hear a satisfactory and persuasive explanation from a vendor as to why
so many printer cartridges leave so much ink behind. Even if the waste
amount is only a few milliliters, that unused liquid could have printed
a lot of pages.

[Author]

November 3, 2008 at 10:47 AM