It's Black And White

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday February 25, 2006

Nick Galvin

Nick Galvin dips into the problem of disappearing colour printer ink.

Frank Ashworth is puzzled. The colour ink in his high-end Canon S900 inkjet printer is disappearing and he wants to know where it is going to.

"I use the printer for text documents in black," said Ashworth. "Very, very occasionally I may print a document with a small amount of colour. Often when my printer stops printing because it is out of ink I still have black ink and it is one or two colours that are out. Why am I out of colours when I don't use them and still have black?"

Why indeed. The most plausible explanation Troubleshooter could come up with was that Ink Fairies were tiptoeing into Frank's house at night and syphoning off his ink, so we contacted Canon for a more sensible answer (something Ashworth himself tried to do but was just "fobbed off").

According to a technical spokesman, colour inks are used even when printing black-and-white documents "because certain elements like underline [are] considered as 'graphics' by the software.

"To minimise the usage of colour the reader can change the driver settings within the Properties to 'grayscale' printing and 'plain' paper.

"If the primary usage continues to be document only I would suggest the reader consider upgrading to a printer that is designed for that purpose, for example, the Pixma iP4200."

Roughly translated, this means that Ashworth has been in the habit of using a Ferrari to pop down to the shops when it might be more appropriate to ride a bike instead.

Still on the topic of ink, anyone who has bought a new inkjet printer cartridge recently will agree the smiling salesperson might as well be trading in rare gems as he relieves you of an obscenely large amount of money for an obscenely small amount of ink. The cheaper alternative is to get exhausted cartridges refilled with third-party ink. Of course, the printer manufacturers would have you believe that not using their hugely expensive ink will wreck your machine and possibly cause the end of the world as we know it.

Rob Vines, of Blaxland, sensibly ignores the warnings and gets his cartridges refilled at a local branch of Cartridge World. However, recently a refilled cartridge for his HP 3-in-1 machine turned out to be a dud. "I was stumped and returned to Cartridge World (www.cartridgeworld.com.au) more in hope than expectation," says Vines. "'Did the cartridge come with a protective strip?' I was asked."

He was then told that a certain kind of strip had been found to react with the ink.

"It was whisked away and moments later replaced with another cartridge with a very different protective mechanism. It worked fine."

All very odd. Troubleshooter contacted Michael Newbond, the technical manager for the Cartridge World chain. He could shed little light on Vines's experience, however, he did say individual stores choose how to seal the nozzles of refilled cartridges and occasionally some materials do react with certain inks.

Newbond added that more problems were caused by customers squeezing every last drop of ink from cartridges before bringing them to be refilled. This can produce excess heat that causes the print head to warp, blocking the ink.

"When the machine tells you the ink level is low, that's the ideal time to re-fill it," he said.