There should be real ACTUAL regulations about stuff like this. It's nothing but landfill and waste, but of course us regular people are the ones who need to use paper straws.
True - but in all honesty, 99.99999% of all printing is waste as well. Unless you are creating the next Magna Carta or the next Mona Lisa, then eventually, your document will end up in the trash at some point.
@@markd.9538 I respectfully disagree. Knowledge printed into books are the backbone of civilization. Million years from now and with gods help when we fly through space we will still have physical media depicting information. Now, we can argue if all information is worth printing, but that's a slippery slope argument.
@@alf3071 you mean the eu, and we didnt do it for apple, every device has to use usb-c, laptops, toothbrushes etc, apple is just the only one playing the victim^^
I used to be a tech journalist, and my Canon printer refused to scan the documents because there was no ink. I made a Facebook post calling out the bs and magically the PR manager gave me the combination to overwrite this limitation. Needless to say this code was not publicly available in any consumer documentation I could find, and I ony got a resposnse because the PR managers were keeping an eye on what I post because I was a journalist. This was in 2014. We need right to repair laws asap, it's getting worse by the day
It's pretty incredible that people keep discovering and exposing this scam, and then the public collectively forgets about it. It's on a cycle like once every 3 years or so.
Because most ppl bearly print anything, those that do learn a trick like this one and move on. 3 years later new ppl that print Comes in and discover the trick and repeat.
@@evenjesuscantsaveyouanymor6163 I bought a good older used HP Laserjet printer and clone toner cartridges cost me around $20.00 and last for thousands of pages with excellent print quality, sure it's only black and white but I find I very rarely need color, and if I do I can go to the office works.
When the chip shortage was happening during COVID, HP actually publicized the reset feature because it was literally impossible for them to get the chips that tell the printer it’s running out.
The reset feature is due to the law suit settled by HP. It required that all printers have an override feature that allows you to continue using your cartridge even when the printer says it is empty. I have been printing for 4 years now with "empty" cartridges in my HP laser jet.
Hi, so i recently picked up a HP envy 5660 inkjet I checked the firmware and it seems to be offline for a little over 3 years, date today is Dec 2023. it was 9 months ago HP unexpectedly sent out the cartridge blocking update. I feel like there's a good chance i may beable to do what Fstoppers YT suggests refill cartridges. So how can I do this on this model? that hasn't recieved their horrendous HP blocking firmware. Please mention if you experienced or seen HP envy 5660 using a DIY refilled cartridge and KNOW a way to bypass refill check on lower frmwares. please tell how to refill 3rd party cartridges withut tripping the refill check. if you do trip the refill check i heard it can hault the printer from using ink. i've printed with it so i know this has not occured. btw my black and white printer is a Brother MFC-L2700DW and ofcourse if this refill myth as shown is actually hurting customers as shown I better be making sure to never continue buying scam cartridges in stores. i mean it shouldn't even be legal for those to be sold with 3 or less mililiters of ink and advertized as 12 and higher.
My parents had an HP printer not long ago, where every couple of days the printer would demand to be recalibrated. To do so, it would always print these highly detailed and graphical instructions on how to take the printed piece of paper and place it in the scanner... This printed piece of paper was always the highest quality print and use up a quarter of the Cartridge of both the black and color ink. This industry is corrupt as hell and warrants an investigation by the FTC....
We have a similar HP printer, we bought cartridges 2 times, after which we realised it was useless, so we got bottles of ink, and we inject the ink when the cartridges dries up it works pretty well, and the ink is also cheap, we are using the same cartridge from last 3 yrs
A few years ago, I found it was hugely cheaper to buy a replacement printer than to buy replacement ink cartridges. Those Canon Pixma printers were about $25 brand new and then the ink was well over $80 for a set. Maybe we should just build houses out of empty printers.
@@BornAgainCynic0086 You want to spend $150 for a printer when you can spend $16 and get more prints than the $150 printer will produce? Do you work for printer company by chance because your math doesn't add up.
@@readhistory2023 Concentrate, I am referring to the cheap bit of junk he bought. I have been retailing printers to users for over 30 years. The ink tank printers are good for what they are, but I repair them weekly, they are unreliable for many people.
@@BornAgainCynic0086if he hadn't wasted so much money trying to replace ink cartridges so often as in the example in this video, he wouldn't have to consider buying new printers each time to save money on the print jobs that those should be doing from the first set of cartridges. The lesson is, don't be so unsympathetic.
When I was in the Army in 2008-2011, Soldiers would buy a printer, and then when they quickly ran out of ink, they balked at buying a new cartridge that cost as much as a printer--so they didn't do anything. As far as we knew, the cartridge that came with the printer contained less than the replacements, but how much less?
But how fast head will start to mess prints? In old cannon they failed after just 2 refils. While hp could print solid until 1500 pages after significant quality drop in printer head.
My printer remembers the cartridge so refilling doesn't work BUT I found a way around that. I have two sets of cartridges, when it runs out I refill the previous cartridge and put that in. I can do this on an endless loop as the printer seems to only remember the cartridge that was just in it.
A few observations from my side 1. I’ve been a poor student in the 2000s and I needed to print quite a lot of stuff, so I bought a second-hand BW inkjet printer and a set of cartridges for it for about $50 (note that it was 20 years ago) and that I’m from the central EU. These cartridges served me for FIVE YEARS. Of course I’ve been refilling them (spent around 1-2 liters of ink) but these were exceptionally resilient. 2. The sponge (or the “diaper” as we called it). There was no warning, it just started leaking. Disassembled, cleaned the sponge, dried it, installed back, that’s it. 3. My friend installed poor man’s “ink tank” pipes into his Canon (drilled the cartridges, installes pipes and connected to ink tanks). Worked like a charm, but started leaking when we printed a lot, A LOT of photographs. Inkjet printers are scam, but if you are ready to get your hands dirty (literally) you can outsmart the scammer.
1. I have used inkjet printers a lot in the past. 1 thing i notice is that even if you refill them, the cartridges don't last past 3-4 refill cycles. the print quality starts to degrade (colours go off, lines and waves start to appear) and the reason is because the print head has a fixed lifespan and sometimes the nozzles get clogged and cannot get clean properly. 2. the sponge under the reservoir became as hard as a piece of pvc after a few years and refused to absorb any ink. sure i could take it out and wash it but the next time the printer switches on, it gets soaked again. 3. I also tried drilling the cartridges with a DIY inkjet-to-ink-tank conversion, did not work well for me because the cartridges are not designed for a constant high volume/high pressure of ink weighing on the print head, so the ink just started haemorrhaging all over the inside of the printer. all these was enough for me to call it quits. was on a canon mp198 though, that thing was ancient so maybe the new inkjets are more resilient. that, plus nowadays used colour laser printers can be had relatively cheaply toner does not leak or vomit over the pages toner lasts forever, no need to worry about print head drying out no need to worry about mis-prints or misalignment enough to convince me to switch. the only things i feel that inkjet still trumps lasers are 1) electricity cost and 2) printing of photos or detailed colour prints eg magazine or poster prints. and even so, epson prints better photos than canon.
Inkjet printers aren't as big a scam as people think - just buy the one that suits your needs!! The $48 printer in this video is designed for very limited home use. Yes you can keep refilling the ink cartridge and keep using it for a long while but honestly a typical user will not be expected to do this. This printer is designed to just work with the most basic methods. No ink? Replace cartridge. Blocked inkjet head? replace cartridge. You pay for the convenience with these machines. I do agree though they absolutely can put more ink in the things!! The fact that you used the printer enough to fill the sponge says that you used the printer beyond its designed lifecycle. You should then purchase a printer than has a replaceable waste ink box - a printer rated for a longer life & duty cycle. The more you spend on a printer the more you realise that printing can be way more cost effective in normal use. The sponge also may not have given you a warning as you kept refilling the same cartridge, in normal use the printer will keep track of how many cartridges used and how many cleaning cycles. No doubt it's most likely that the printer would not have given a warning regardless but you can't fault the printer if you use it outside specifications without knowing otherwise. People truly underestimate how complex a printer actually is from the point you press print to when the final page comes out. As a printer technician it bothers me most with cheap paper - that's the real scam!! Users buy the cheapest paper and blame the machine or myself when it jams continuously, the quality looks shit and wonder why the printer is so unreliable from all the cheap paper dust that is coating every square inch inside the machine. You may save some money on cheap paper but you'll be paying it back in parts and service costs.
There is one potential problem, and it would be nice to see if you encounter it: each time the printer cleans the heads, that ink goes into a reservoir - and if that reservoir is full, the printer may brick up with a horrible error message. This reservoir - usually a sponge - is also usually not replaceable. Given this printer seems to clean the print heads after each page, this might happen sooner than later. This is the reason I gave up on inkjets - apart from the cost of the ink - having to buy a new printer just because a sponge filled up...
Same here. I am tired of print head cleanup. I don't use it often. When I want to print a photo, the time wasted on cleanup is far more than printing the photo (including prepare and editing). After switching to color laserjet, my headache was gone.
Its called a waste ink pad, I mentioned it in the previous videos as it is one of the evil ways of printers making everything too diffilcut and expensive for end customer. HOWEVER it can be reset ("hacked") with no consequences, as the ink usually dries - thats the reason printers are cleaning their heads. Refiling very cheap ink, reseting this allowed me to use a printer for 15years. Which is exactly how it should be, if companies werent evil.
I am pretty sure even the huge professional printers have this function. You have to use them every day or the printer head dries up and you have to buy a new one for hundreds of dollars. People have to set up automatic printing when they go on vacation so they don't break these pro equipment. It's the ink system. It sucks.
I think folks call this the safety razor method. Give away the handle and make your profit on the blades. I knew one guy who bought a new $40 printer each time he was out of the ink that came with the printer. It was cheaper for him than buying new ink.
This is exactly correct. It is becoming very common in other industries as well. Hint: don't take your car to a dealership for repairs- they make more money in the shop than they do on the sales floor.
No Lol, Just No.. stop with the misinformation, they sell printer like they sell anything in the world, at a profit, but they aim for less profit to encourage sales and compensate by selling ink @@dgillies5420
This was eye-opening. I always knew printer companies relied on ink cartridge sales to cover their losses on printer sales (which they often sell at or below manufacturing cost), but I never realized the lengths they've gone to waste ink to boost cartridge sales. It's almost like how insurance companies seem to actively try to find ways to not pay out during claims.
I also have Canon printer and I can confirm that it wastes huge amount of ink when it's doing the cleaning cycle. Every second time that i start the printer it is doing that for like 1 minute. After few years the sponge is completely soaking to the point I can't use colors anymore because it gets dirty from it every time. For some reason this is not a problem with only using black ink. At least not yet.
@@Reloadownreally? Playstation is doing the same. They sell the console under the manufacturing cost and take back that loss on the price of games. A game costs way more on Playstation compared to the pc-version of the same game. Same with printers. Those are cheap and they make profit by selling you ink cartridges. If you bought a printer once for only 50 euros and it comes with 1 black and 1 color cartridge, you'll understand. I've had such a printer and if you bought the cartridges separately, you paid 60 euros for 1 black cartridge and 80 euros for the color one. So both cartridges alone are 140 euros while the printer along with those cartridges is only 50 euros total. Even if the cartridges have about half the ink of a new cartridge, it's still cheaper to buy a new printer with cartridges than buying the cartidges separately.
Everyone should share this on social media to create as much exposure and awareness as possible so we can end this nonsense, and maybe even begin class action lawsuits so people who have wasted tons of money on this scam can get a little something back. I would share it myself, but I don't really use any social media platforms besides YT.
search for AustinMcConnell, he tried to do that 5 years ago and nothing changed. You underestimated the power of mega corporation, they can bend the law to fit their benefit.
Be aware that there's another problem. All that "flushing" ink has to go somewhere and that's another foam pad in that Canon printer and the printer knows how much ink that can take and will FAIL when this non-consumable item is "fuill". I am aware that some Ricoh printers have a user-replaceable waste ink container for precisely this purpose. Of course, it's very hard to make a printer and sell it retail for $50 and make money, especially when you expect the retailer is buying it for 50% of that. These things are loss leaders trying to make their money on the Ink. Its a nasty practice and somewhat dishonest I feel. And don't get me started on the unnecessary environmental waste.
I had this same issue with my Brother laser printer and all I had to do is take out the waste tray open it up clean it and fiddle with a connector or something (I forgot it was two years ago). Kicker was that it wasn't even all that dirty inside barely 10-20% full! and they wanted me to buy another $35 waste toner box!
Yes, on inkjet, this "container" is often a basically a diaper of padded material, and not easily accessible. And in my case I found a code to reset it, but it was still full and swollen, so after it swell even more, it bend and jammed the mechanics.
@@HoopyAmero Brother Laser printers have what's called a waste toner box, this is a cheap consumable item, last one I ordered was £20 and was good for 50000 prints and at least you can replace them easily and inexpensively, once the ink well in a domestic inkjet printer is full it's time to buy a new printer.
The fact that it cleans the heads after every page is insane. Using color ink in the black text is also just a way to use ink quicker. I have an Epson Ecotank printer now. If I want a large high quality photo printed, i just use a service... no more ink carts for me!
Inkjet printers don't normally clean after every page, they will do a clean when you switch the printer on or wake up periodically and do a clean if the printer is left on but in standby mode but they don't clean after every page, this is definitely not normal. As for using the colour to print black, if you set to greyscale then they won't . The problem with Ecotank printers is you are paying a lot more for that privilege, generally a low end inkjet printer at higher end inkjet price, when they first come on the market you'd pay £200 for the ecotank version of a £40 printer, in other words the only difference was one had the ecotank compartment, the other took cartridges, otherwise exactly the same
@@luvstellauk Yes, the Ecotank costs more initially, but it comes with a full set of ink... probably more than $200 worth of comparable cartridges. If you print a lot, it makes much more sense. The fact that the printer in the video uses color ink for printing black text by default is a total money grab, and most people won't even be aware of it.
@@GetOffMyyLawn It costs what it actually costs to manufacture and sell with some profit margin. As opposed to a cartridge-based printer, which they sell for far less than would be economically viable by itself if they weren't extorting so much profit out of cartridges.
In the early/mid 2000's my buddy worked a locally owned store called "Rapid Refill". They would very professionally take ink cartages apart, fill them and resell them. People would either have theirs filled or swap with an already filled one. It was great business, but I think they got shut down by the manufactures of these ink cartridges, its hard to remember .
Most manufacturers put chips on their cartridges and update the firmware of the printers without the user knowledge remotely to prevent them from using recycled or compatible cartridges. HP is the worse in that field. Right now, they are pushing updates every 3 months to lock out the users from using 3rd party cartridges and also, once you get the firmware updated WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT, you cannot deactivate "automatic updating" because they remove the option from the machine.
I'm so happy I don't have to deal with ink scams. Getting a color laser printer in 2015 when it was on sale for $85 was one of the greatest decisions ever. I'm still using the included cartridges and they're 45% full. The toner cartridges may be more expensive to replace but they can print 4800 pages.
Update... I watched this video 4 months ago when it came out. Like many, I had experienced much of the same frustration you describe, but without knowing the true extent of the underlying issues. A couple weeks ago I ditched my cartridge printer and got a tankless printer. Just wanted to thank you for exposing this issue is a straight-forward, methodical manner.
The stop/cancel button trick for this type of Canon printer is well documented, this has been the case on various generations of Canon printer (where the printhead is part of the cartridge) for the 15 or so years I've worked in the industry. The message that comes up on your computer screen when the cartridge is empty tells you to do this to continue printing because what actually happens is the machine stops and lets you know that a cartridge is low, once you over ride the message it will not warn you again for that particular cartridge and you can continue printing until the quality deteriorates.
Fantastic tests man. FYI...most modern printers are designed to completely stop working when that "reservoir" you mentioned is full. In most cases, this will happen automatically after 7 years even if the printer is fully functional and that "reservoir" is empty and dry. What a scam.
Don't quote me on that, but I saw a video on TH-cam about Epson ecotank which shows that this reservoir is actually serviceable, i.e. you can switch the sponge inside.
@@questcoast Replacing it at least in the newer generation is very easy, even if you are not supposed to be able to do that as lay person for the entry level devices. Sadly, you will also need a reset program. Consider this part of the running cost and add like 20% to the ink cost.
@@questcoast higher end Ecotanks sell you a chipped reservoir that you have to work with, but the cheapest Ecotank has a pad and the classic full stop error message.
My ancient Epson ecotank L365 (about 8 years) still works decently enough, had to clean that reservoir a couple of years back, it was basically just unscrewing a Phillips head and shifting the compartment to one side so it could fall down and clean the sponge inside, I don´t remember but I believe I had to reset it as well. Not exactly the greatest but at least they don't sell their ink as if it was one of the rarest substance on earth.
My experience with ecotank (epson) printers has been that the actual printer breaks before you run out of ink. So either way they get you, you either buy ink or you buy a whole new printer because they're built as cheaply as possible.
can confirm, I got one of those starter 3 in 1 and the Printer broke down more then the ink ran out, the result is indeed beautiful and the cost to ink ratio great. but having to take the printer every month just to unclog or fix something else was too much. The solution to Epson printers is to buy the real expensive ones that are made for Industry use, those can last years before going bad in any manner. But again those cost upwards of 1500$ so your paying a lot one way or the other.
There is a "waste reservoir" where all of that ink cleaned from the head goes. (It's usually a foam pad inside the printer) You will also need to replace this eventually or risk having a puddle of used ink inside the printer, or sometimes get an printer error for full waste reservoir.
The other scam is that foam pad is just.... well a foam pad, there is no sensor in it, on it or anywhere around it. Yet at some point it spews out an error that it is full and to (of course) bring it in for repair. In reallity it just counts printed pages and at some point invites to get fleeced in the repair center. That is also the reason those ink-tank printers (also mentioned in the video) are worthless. It may hold a lot of ink but you are gonna get charged regularly to basically clear an error code which you can't clear yourself in order to continue printing.
I also have Canon printer and this sponge got completely soaking after few years to the point that i can't print colors anymore because it will always gets dirty from it and the print looks like crap. For some reason using only black ink still works fine. I was also looking for the way to replace that sponge but i would have to dissasemble everything to get to the whole thing. And i don't know if i can still even buy it.
What others do is they drill a hole at the back and find a small rubber hose inside and pipe it out so the ink is drained outside directly and not onto that pad. Of course this should be done before that sensor is triggered.
you don't need to drill a hole, there is already a tiny hole that you can stick the needle under the sticker. if you have big hole, you might experience leaking from the print head. also make sure you re-attach the sticker back on exactly at the same spot. i refill my canon cartridge like this for years and never have problem after the reset.
I usually try to find the hole by touching and pressing the stickers, and fill the ink using syringe, after that cover the hole using a tape... Works like a charm
I've worked for an aftermarket printer ink company for almost 20 years. Each cartridge has a different yield, though most cartridges have their pages rated at 5% coverage. I've seen some brands even quantify it is 3.5% or 4% coverage. If you condensed all your print into a block half the size of a playing card, you're using 5% of your page = 1 page off your page count. (As you saw, you get less "pages" when you print more on your page, so it's just a way to quantify the amount of prints you could expect. Though in all fairness, people often use more than 10-15% of their page, equally 2-3 pages off the cartridges total.) Cartridges are quite expensive, though you'd find through the years they've always been about the same price, despite most other consumables going up in price. The way they make this happen is by giving you less ink in the cartridge. This resulted in cartridges that are basically filled with 3ml of ink. 5 years ago 5ml was pretty standard, 10 years ago 8ml was pretty standard, 20 years ago, you could find cartridges that contained 20ml+ of ink. The truth is that the cost is mostly in the body of the cartridge. And if they can't really make a lot off one sale, they'll try to make a little of a lot of sales. The type of cartridge in your video contains all of the important printing components. An analogy I often use: Imagine every time you need gas, it's like replacing your whole gas tank. This is your situation. (It may sound funny, but most OEM generally overfill cartridges by ~10-25%, compared to their page rating, because if you had a cartridge that was supposed to print 250 pages @ 5% coverage, and started having quality issues around page 240 @5% coverage, you have a valid reason to complain. Maybe they're doing that less and less now days, as you really should have gotten 5 fully black pages out of a PG-275 cartridge with it's 100 page @5% coverage rating. Canon also lists this cartridge as having 5.6ml, so if you only got 3ml out of it, the remainder of the ink is still saturated in the sponge and may or may not eventually gravitate toward the printhead.) I know you think you disproved this, but cartridges generally don't have the ability to sense actual ink levels. It IS calculating the wasted ink being used to prime the cartridge. It's just an estimate though, and those estimates can be/will be off. This is partially why an override (as performed in your video) is available as an (mostly hidden) option to keep using the cartridge. They estimate based on a countdown. You can think of this in this way: You install a cartridge, the printer recognizes a serial number from the cartridge. As you use the cartridge, the number of pages it calculates/associates with that serial number counts down to nothing. (This is how you could pop in multiple cartridges of varying levels, and the machine still provides the "accurate" ink level of each cartridge.) Printer's used to have very limited memory, so you could tape over some electronics, pop it back in, remove it, tape over some other contacts, remove it, take off the tape, and the printer would suddenly have forgotten the ink level associated with that cartridge. Obviously, today, memory is not limited anymore. You could install a thousand cartridges, and your printer will still recognize the previous calculated level on any of them. Some Brother inkjet cartridges do have a mechanical check. Basically as the ink goes down, a float covers a window, when that window is obscured, the cartridge will read as empty. (They used this in place of electronics that work as described above.) However, this is still not actual detection of ink throughout it's use. Just that it is or is not empty. The cartridges in your video do have a secondary check though. Something akin to a fuse. If you bring the actual ink below a certain level (say 25%) the "fuse" pops. When I sell refill kits for these cartridges, I have to point out to customers that you really really want to refill before you reach 50% ACTUAL ink. And I usually use the analogy of a car with a broken gas gauge. Take it set amount miles then top it off. If you don't do this you'll eventually have an error reading that states something like "damaged cartridge." Printers often use color even when only printing in black. This is because after they're removed from their packaging and installed, they're constantly being exposed to air. Cartridges drying out after you've printed only a few pages because they've been sitting in your printer for 6 months without use is a legitimate problem that manufacturers try to avoid. There's also a priming process, every time you print a page. I know this is wasteful, but if it didn't do this priming process, you may run into quality issues. Say you haven't used your printer lately, and instead of the printer priming it just goes straight to printing out the photograph you want to print. Odds are fairly good that you'll have wasted even more ink, because the first few passes printed out poorly and now you have to reprint the whole thing. This is also the reason you want to keep your printer on at all times. Yes, it will occasionally prime and waste some ink, but it's just keeping it "fresh" for the moment you decide to use it. On printers where the printhead is part of the machine, you can permanently clog/damage your machine if the printhead does not have ink flowing properly. The printhead contains thousands and thousands of pores regulated by heat resistors. Whenever those heat resistors are activated, but ink is not flowing through to keep them cool, they have a good chance of overheating and burning out permanently. Just going to give a simplified example: Lets say you have a 100x100 (10,000) grid of heat resistors. During a print job you run out of ink in the middle of a page. You may have burnt out 1000 of those resistors, that's 10% of the printing capability of that cartridge that will NEVER work again. 10% might not even be noticeable to the average person, once you start accumulating more and more damage, it will become noticeable if you refill the cartridge. (In this example, you could burn out 0, or 1k, or 3k, or all 10k, or really anything in between. And your print would be missing a corresponding amount of print permanently. You could think of it like running a car engine without oil.) This is also the reason that remanufactured cartridges are often considered lower quality. Remanufacturers get these cartridges and have to judge what's acceptable to refill/resell. It's very rarely 100% working, as a significant portion of people don't replace/recycle cartridges before there is some symptom of failure. It can be really hard to notice a cartridge that has only 5% damage to the printhead, but much easier to notice a cartridge has 25% damage resulting in 25% of the print is missing. (Sorry for the extra long comment, I could honestly write a book on this topic...)
You missed the point about the priming function, it does it after every page, not only when you turn it on, or for the first few, or just for the first page.
@@drudan8957 It's not a standard function of every inkjet printer, even if the one shown in the video does it after ever page. Lots of printers have different quirks. Most prime on wake/start up. it's also common for them to prime on the first print in a given timeframe. Some prime randomly every few hours or days, and it would seem that some even prime on every page. However, every page is certainly not normal for a majority of inkjet printers that have ever existed. It could be argued that this is a design to waste ink, but it could also be argued that it's required by the design of the cartridge to achieve the best overall results even if it's at the expense of wasting some ink. It's easy to see the negatives here, but you have to realize that there's often a logical reason behind it. Waste a relatively small amount of ink for priming OR waste an entire page/picture worth of ink because there was poor print on the first inch or two. I'll fully agree that OEM ink companies, like most large companies, are in the business of sucking out as much money from you as possible, but I don't think that they're purposefully being extra malicious about it at EVERY turn. Using priming to provide quality prints, not malicious. However, putting 5.6ml in a cartridge that could hold 15ml, is a different story. (Bulk ink really isn't expensive enough to be used as an excuse to only put 5.6ml in a cartridge. Even at the small quantities my company purchases, we're talking 5 gallons for ~$140. I can't even imagine how much of a bulk rate Canon receives.... Then they put 1/3500 of that into a cartridge and charge $20-30-40-50 per cartridge. Honestly, that's probably the most outrageous thing about the ink business.) Just as it was exaggerated in the video, everyone believes/jokes that ink is more expensive by weight than gold, and printing companies use this belief as an open door to unapologetically charge so much for such little ink.
@@pendragon00thank you for posting what I was trying to get into words. This sort of extreme “conspiracy!” clickbait video is just based on ill informed lay persons “knowledge” without bothering to explore the engineering principles, constraints or motivations behind some of these designs. My area is the waste ink aspect which is often described as “planned obsolescence” and the myths there are equally bad. Anyway, I doubt very much a considered response to this video or topic would get a fifth of the views and shouts of “you’re part of this” would likely follow… *sigh*
Thank you for your comment. I've been working in a laser cartridge recycling company for the past 12 years and everything you said is spot on. You did a better job at explaining this than me. I would just like to point out : Remanufactured cartridges are lower quality in inkjet. In the laser world, if you get a good company that recycle and remanufacture cartridges the correct way, you get a product that is as good as the OEM. The correct way to recycle a toner cartridge is to replace every part that can and will wear down then refill it with toner. Some place just put new toner in them which is no good. The % of return / defective cartridge for original HP is 5%. We actually have a 4% return rate and we include free service if a cartridge would fail, at our own expense. We do that to prove to the customers that we know our products are good and to not be brainwashed by the big corp saying "remanufactured toner cartridge will harm your printer"
Also a great option: Canon printers that are a bit more expensive with separate color cartridges that don't change the head when you change cartridge. There are transparent, after-market cartridges on the market, that allow very easy refilling without drilling any holes on the cartridge. You buy a liter of ink of every color and you print everything. Too lazy to refill? No problem. Instead of refilling, you can simply change the cartridges with non-originals for 0.30-0.50€. Very nice video. Good work.
I don't know about canon, but epson printers had their ink reservoir on the outside of the inner parts and refillable since years ago, no more custom made reservoir by drilling the cartridge.
Buying third party ink cartridges is also a great option for many printers. Quality of ink does vary, but they definitely last a long time.There are a several sites which do have these shady ink cartridges for fractionally lower prices. I'm pretty happy with mine.
You said 35 and my mind just about exploded. I knew i had made a smart decision buying a color laser printer as a college freshman as my essays spat out from its mouth at light speed before my classes, little did i know that thanks to 3rd party toner cartridges, it would play a big role in keeping my business profitable 13 years later 👌 I also ALWAYS tell people to print b&w if its not a photo. Often times if you dive into the printer driver settings, theres a hidden greyscale setting, vs trying to trust ones word processing or browser application to know how to set the printer to what i call "hard grayscale." Rich black can be useful but fuck it wastes ink with word docs. Mostly you only need it for graphic design work with blacks butting against rich colors, plain K black looks empty next to bright colors without some CMY mixed in.
There is a special paper being sold for presentation purposes or if you want the highest quality print. It is extra white with some primer or something on it, it does produce beautiful prints. I can tell you from experience that using that paper instead of the regular one makes a whole lot more of a difference than using color on B/W prints or not. And it is cheaper as the paper is not that much more expensive than the regular paper. Laser printers have their uses, but I personally prefer the look of injet prints, seems more vibrant to me. If you want a hassle-free experience, laser is definetly the way to go, though.
This is why years ago I switched to a toner based printer. However I do understand that toner isn't always the best for certain types of printing, however in my experience those are in the 1% exceptions for most of my printing needs. Now toner based printers are not without their "waste" faults, but they are far more minimal compared to ink printing. Also toner doesn't "go bad" or dry up.
The end of this video is amazing. You may have just saved me a small fortune. Literally. If they had any heart at all or were just kind of fair, I would be a happy customer
FYI, some printers (HP if I’m not mistaken) actually keep track of how much ink has been ejected into the cleaning area. Then when the printer believes that area is full, it disables itself.
All printers have to deal with excessive material. For inkjets, it's a sponge for ink used during head cleans, for laser printers it is a container for toner that didn't get fully fused. For inkjets there is no good technical solution for actually measuring how full the sponge is and users would make hell of a fuzz if the sponge ended up being full. So the existence of the sponge is not the problem. The problem is that most cheaper printers don't consider the sponge user-servicable. It needs some care like putting some paper under the device and wearing gloves, but it is not hard to do. There is no reason why a 10EUR replacement part shouldn't be available and just work. For some printers, reset programs are available though. For laser printers, it is a bit easier as the toner powder is solid and can be measured e.g. with a light sensor. Some models include the waste toner container in the toner cartridge, for others it is a separate box. Not all of them provide a replacement either and I'd argue that having to empty it by hand is an actual health hazard.
One thing I'd like to point out that I don't think I've seen posted here, the reason why when you're using colour ink when printing "blank" pages is because most printers using a yellowish tint on every print. These are used to track what printer you used, and what time it was printed. It's used for law enforcement to sometimes track criminals. It's not super well known but I think that it's still useful information to some of you. :)
It's also to keep the color print head from drying out and clogging up (I think it could be solved without blowing ink, but that might cost them a few cents to a dollar), AND because rich black (black including CMY) actually DOES look different on higher quality papers - K alone looks a bit flat and bluish by comparison.
One time I tried to scan and print a $20 bill and my printer printed a warning that it was illegal to do that and printed a link to a website "for more info". I was stupid enough to go to that website, I think they caught and stored my IP when I went to that link.
This is a great hack. I gave up on inkjets 15yrs ago. Been using a black and white laser since. Ive been meaning to buy an inkjet for printing photos but always been put off by cartridge prices.
That fix by canon to continue using cartridges after they are detected as empty by the system is actually a feature. A message will pop up telling you to press a particular button for a certain amount of time if you wish to continue using the now detected "empty" cartridge. You can continue refilling those cartridges until the head fails and print quality deteriorates. Some cartridges such as the PG810 and CL811 can be refilled several times and can print a lot of pages before head failure.
Just to put it into perspective: I just did the math with a set of 11.2 ml Canon ink cartidges (68 Dollars) and a 1.5 liter bottle of 2010 Dom Perigon (626 Dollars). The ink is $6.07 per milliliter, while the Dom Perignon is a mere $0.42 per milliliter. That means that desktop printer ink is 14x (!) more expensive than a premium champagne!
Try getting scales that go down to tenths or lower of a gram. Then when you do the cleaning test, you can see exactly how much ink it uses just to do the cleaning.
@@EricChiEric This was exactly my first thought, but the difference in density is just so much, that it is not really relevant for this: Water at 20C - 0.99802 g/cm2, Black ink at 20C - 1.0743 g/cm2, so not even 0.1g/cm2 difference. But he should have 100% definitely comment on this, so people who know that different fluids have different density don't need to go and do research by themselves.
This is so infuriating and everybody knows we're being screwed over. Thanks so much for clarifying and/but what do we do to change this ridiculous system?
Easy: Buy the cheap printer and then never buy a single cartridge (refill them instead). If enough people do that, they have to change their business model.
I’ve just been using laser printers exclusively for around a decade. Brother makes some black and white only (good enough for 99% of what I do) duplexing wifi/AirPrint models for around a hundred bucks which last forever and the 40 dollar toner pack lasts me a few years at a time.
The reason for the reset feature is because of 2020-2022. Canon couldn't get enough chips due to the great chip shortage of 2020-2022 for their inktanks, so they were forced due to a manufacturing shortage to make it so that people could use non-genuine tanks to run their printers. Personally I'm happy with my laser printer though, here in Australia, ink is expensive, and I only ever print in black and white. My Kyocera ECOSYS printer will do well over 7000 pages to a single toner, and the toner $40 for a non-genuine.
Can't thank you enough for exposing ink scams. The scam has been going on for a long time, and, sadly, there is no law to prevent it. Years ago, a friend who worked in the ink industry, producing products for Canon, Epson, and others, stated that the markup for consumer inks is 90%. It's not the printer that companies are cashing in, it’s the inks and worth more than gold. Again, no law has ever been placed to prevent these companies from overcharging consumers; lawmakers must have investments with them.
There's always more to the story. Even if you fill it back up, your "smart" printer would recognise that it's the same old cartridge being reused and would either print blurry or just crap. I know this cuz i have the canon's wireless inkjet which i bought last year. It worked a number of times before i started having this problem. But i figured out a way around it. It seems it recognises text somehow and tries to blur it but if you print a page as a photo it would print perfectly.
They way they limit pages printed varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and by model. It can be really simple sometimes. I had brother printer that simply had a cog that would turn a little every time a page got printed. Cog would block the moment it did full 360° turn which was 300 pages or whatever. So regardless if you printed bunch of pages full of text or just one small black dot per page it would scream its out of toner. What we were doing was unscrew that cog, return it to 0° position and print another 200 or 300 pages out of same toner.
Thank you for your service. You are educating all of us, and making us aware of scummy business tactics. I would also like to express my gratitude, that you don't stop there, instead you check if it is possible to outsmart the scammer. Great video, mad respect.
canon's printer is this category is bit better. as stated on the video you can override the massages and refill yourself. its much cheaper, but costed you your time (and sanity) if you refill it manually. but HP's printer, thats belong to deepest hell imaginable. its truly cannot be bypassed.
It's cool to see photo / video channels actually making physical products / food / real estate investments so that they can use their photo/ video skills to promote and grow a business. The hot sauce business will teach so many lessons - cool to see it featured on the channel
This happens when large corporations finance candidates for the presidency. Once in office, they own their loyalty to them. We are living a fascist system. The far right is in bed with the government. But they try to make us belive that it is the left who is corrupting the government. So you look at the wrong direction.
Adding your own ink, works, I refilled canon ink cartridges about 20 years ago plus. I stopped doing it, 20 plus years ago because the foam inside the cartridges broke down and destroyed the print head. At a time when the bubble jet printers were £600 and the ink was almost £20 each and there were 4 of them... I changed to a small mono laser printer as a workhorse, using ink jet printers for occasional photo printing. If I want to print photographs now I use a wet print photo service. Basic cost about £1.00 per A3 size standard print. Everything else I now use a colour laser after retiring the mono printer after twenty plus years of good service.
Used to own a Canon multi-function printer. You’re not completely out of the woods by refilling the ink cartridges. The built-in printheads on these cartridges are only designed to last for the quantity of ink it has in the reservoir, give or take a few cycles. I’ve seen these fail after a few refills so you will still need to replace the whole cartridge every now and then. Still better than buying a new one every time the ink runs out, but just saying.
Same here, they are not the best - but who cares, its still quite a good deal, you just need to have a reserve one if you really care about quality of print when suddenly the old one will start failing. I wonder, whether they will die sooner when you print every day, or in the other case when you print just about so often that the head will dry every time
@@restoreleader yeah, I didn't bother going through the refill route on my then Canon. There were services being offered to convert it to continuous ink. But since the cartridges themselves didn't last as long, you would still need to purchase new ones every now and then and THEN transfer the continuous ink kit. Too cumbersome and messy so I just stuck with OEM ink cartridges. I must've gone through 6 or 7 black and color cartridges through the printer's life. Sold it after a few years and bought an Epson EcoTank in 2021. After 2 years, I'm on the 2nd black ink bottle but still on the first batch of colored inks. This was the first time I didn't stress or worry about ink usage and I'm glad I made the switch.
I actually like how Canon allows you to bypass the cartridges, so you can refill them and use them again. (I also know this trick for like 10 years so it's very good that it's still working) While on the Epson, you can't refill them but I believe you can find refillable cartridges with a reset chip. And on the Brother, just refill it and it will work including the ink level. Fortunately, we are moving to the factory installed inktank system. So we don't have to face these crazy expensive ink cartridges again.
I bought cheaper refilled ink carts for my epson printer and the printer gave me an error. The cheap ink carts did have a chip too. I will buy from another online seller, maybe i can find some that my printer likes
Careful with instantink too. I had fraud on my card and then forgot the account was linked to that card. They canceled my account and needed to print and was unable to use the printer until I updated the account with them. Also hp printer we bought doesn't print if you try to make copies on the scanner or feeder anymore to which they said I need a new printer because to repair it will cost more than what I paid. The whole thing is a scam. And paying 6.99 a month to print 100 pages ....I dunno....my husband and I are over it
@@sarahgarcia2850 Thank you for the info. Subscription based printer? Page counter instead of ink level? Sound like scam. And HP? My dad said it was junk (I believe it's from 2006? and it broke at 2007 or 2008 or so, it was changed to Brother DCP-135c which you can refill the cartridges, but at that time the ink quality is junk. and it broke the print head like 3-4 years later) I'd suggest you to buy a cheap bypassable printer, if the ink is low you refill it and bypass.
Well done. In about 2017 I saw a clip by a guy who used to work at a call centre selling office supplies. He said that the printer cartridges for the colour cyan were well and truly overcharged (or, in Australian English, a rip-off). Your clip extends that to the other cartridges as well.
Worth noting that the printer is actually printing micro dots on the page that was implemented to be used by authorities for identifying counterfeit bills. There's usually some stuff encoded all over the page. It's tiny dots but visible under a microscope.
We used to do event printing with Canon printers and their early Pixma line needed no cartridge chips, no countdown clocks, no catch foam pad sensors, nothing! It was why you wanted the Canon vs HP, Lexmark, Epson, or Kodak. After that we noticed the quality of new models hardly improved but the profitability of them must have skyrocketed once they adopted the "chip" strategy. We got smart and bought every one of those printers we could find.
2:30 about using CMY for black text. Commercial/industrial printer here. We have a saying that not all blacks are equal. See rich black (and its variations such as SWOP rich black, C60M50Y40K100 rich black (TAC250), and more) vs clean one-color black. One-color black is neutral but isnt deep black. So usually photos use rich black while elements like text use one-color black. But this surmises that you also use overprint vs knockout. It really depends on the source and your RIP (how the file is translated to what inks an how much to use). Usually for text, its recommended to use one color black on overprint. But you'll need more advanced software to tell that to your printer.
@@wonderingworld119 the world is filled with all kinds of buyers. Oddly enough, in my side of the world, cheap buyers expect more from their cheap purchases as if it should be able to do everything and excel at it. While buyers with deeper pockets usually understand more or less what they're getting. Unfortunately, there are obviously more cheap buyers buying cheap printers versus buyers with more money buying cheap printers because they know they only need cheap prints.
Great video on the state of ink jet printers. Some people really don't want to mess with trying to refill cartridges themselves so that might not be an option. Also by reusing the previous cartridges the heads will eventually fatally clog. Not that big a deal since in the meantime you are saving so much money, but something to consider. For myself I will never buy an ink jet again. It's laser for me. Toner is dry so it never dries out so you have to throw out a half full cartridge. Heads don't clog since it uses a photoconductor and and fuser. It's just so much less fuss since the manufacturers are all concentrating on ink since that is the gold mine for them.
This reminds me of the HD signals being exploited by providers. Back then, you only need either RGB cables or HDMI to get a high res on TV, signal bandwidths back then are already high to avoid bad pictures, just using the right cables and you're all set. Then providers saw this and intentionally blocked or tuned down channels forcing you to use their "new boxes" which are basically calibrated not to render HD resolution if you aren't subscribed to their HD fees, or with Comcast/Xfinity they call it *"HD Technology Fee"* that's additional $9.90, don't believe that it's part of your "package", no it's not, it's an ADD-ON, if you got your package before it was implemented, you probably experienced No Signals on a lot of channels using HDMI or RGB cables, coz' the code wasn't added. So, you call Tech Support, they add it and you complain to billing why your Bill goes up, and they tell you bunch of BULLSHITS like taxes and other fees. They also tried *"DATA CAPPING!"* which was absolute EVIL! We literally have no say against these diabolical companies!
Incredible. Thanks for this eye opening video! In my experience, HP printers are a SCAM. Even with brand new cartridges, they dried up after a month or 2. So I bought an EPSON EcoTank 2850 after a friends recommendation. I am SO HAPPY with it and have never looked back! 🙏 I’ve put up a quick video on my channel documenting the opening, setup, and test print.
Mine prompted the stop override about a month ago. I had to do it for each color before I could print anything only using black. I will try the refills for once. I don’t print often so I never bothered before. Thanks for the video!
Lee, this simply a pure quality information video - incredible practical value on what to do if you want to buy an ink printer but avoid this ink cartrige crazyness. I watched your previous video where you at first thought that the inktank would be a solution - I'm glad that continued to sophisticate your printing efficiency, I think similarly that's why I like it so much and was searching for exactly a video like this. This actually also removes the problem with inktank refill machines where the ink just has more place to get stuck and dry and problem with the inefficiency of the spilling actually a significant amount of ink in those sponges in the back of some of those printers where they tried to solve the drying issue with regular automatic flushes, etc.
Keep making these videos! We need to make this viral so something eventually gets done about it. It is criminal behaviour, and the reason I don't buy printers any more.
The Scam goes even further: They have a reservoir for cleaning the heads. But when it gets filled up eventually, the Printer will refuse to work and even if you´ll empty it out, you can´t reset it. And Canon is the worst offender there. And even the Inktanks will fail that way.
Don't know much about resetting a Canon printer with a full waste tank thing.. but in epson, there is a software for a specific or series of printers that can reset its counter and other factory diagnostics things. Also on brother printers, they have a key combinations and codes to do the same thing.
@@svcross-do most in epson printers have some kind of access door at the back where you can remove the waste ink pad. But in brother and cannon printers, you need to disassemble the whole thing to remove the waste ink pad. Brother printers have a large waste ink pad that can survive a couple of resets before it starts to leak. I just reuse the InkPad, I flush it with water until all the waste ink is out , dry it then slap it back to the printer.
for tank printers, at least with epson, most modern versions have replacement reservoirs that are reasonably priced. The model I use, I know almost certainly uses a simple counter, because I read on that people have tried to replace the sponge.
Genuinely one of the best explanations of the entire situation that I’ve had. I always knew ink cartridges never properly indicated their levels but I didn’t know it was this bad
These printers are meant for occasional printing, if you need printer for regular printing then buying inktank printer is a simple solution but if you are little technical you can fill these cartridges, and why cartridges price is higher because companies sell these types of printer with subsidized(at loss) rates and recover its cost by selling cartridges at high cost because not everyone can refill it thats why you get these types of printer at very reasonable rates. So the simple answer is if you are little technical then cartridges printer get your print done at barely nothing and if you are ordinary consumer then you should go for the inktank one. Thank you for reading.
You have to set the output type to "Black & White" or the equivalent in the print/printer settings. Printing black in colour mode will still use colour. You didn't mention if you did this, but that **should** work. Great video!
The problem is that the print head is designed to break quickly - so refilling won't work forever, trust me. They knew that people would refill the cartridges with their own ink, that's why the heads were made to wear out quickly and start printing badly afer few refills (still better then buying new, but a laser printer is an unimaginably better option)
How many refills can a cartridge support? For me, the problem with laser printers is that they emit toxic stuff (nano plastic particles that can be lodged in your lungs). Printer companies and people say that cheap refilled cartridges would emit more of those toxic stuff. I can't verify if that is true or just the printer companies trying to scare us, but since it's something related to health, I don't want to risk it. Of course, an original cartridge for a laser printer is almost as expensive as the printer itself.
@@typingcat this is the first time I've heard of this regarding health risks from laser printers - I'll have to do some research, as I work in a room with an active large laser printer. The new cartridge for that printer is quite expensive, about two to three times more expensive than an ordinary inkjet cartridge for a plotter and printer, but you can print thousands of pages with one cartridge - we literally forget when it was replaced, and it is used and printed all the time.
@@typingcat I just refilled mine for 2 years without issue (HP). But, I let it run out and had to buy another cartridge. I couldn't find a hack to reset it...
Yeah, i think my family got our first color laser printer like 20 years ago. I don't remember how exactly how long, but I think it was only after like 2 years of normal use, that we needed to change the cartridge, and still the cartridge was quite cheap and to change it was like 10sec. To this day I do not understand why people buy ink printers for home use, and for that matter even offices. If your largest paper you print is A3, then you 100% don't need ink printers, and on that special occasion when you need to print something colorful and of superior quality, you should go to a printing workshop and pay those few $ and get a quality print on a quality paper.
Working in the inkjet business for more than 16 years, you should know there is a GOLDEN rule: if you want to have PURE black color in your print, when making (or using pre-made) color profiles you always need to use combine CMY to create a good "neutral" black. In particular with "low cost" inks... printing only one pure color, commonly results in printing- & color anomalies where the black appears to be blueish when using a photospectrometer. Or even in the worst case, cause some kind of banding while fast printing. But in the end, the ink business itself is a SCAM, that is true. Knowing that producing inks per liter, only costs a few tens of dollars per liter... And about inkjet-printers, something else you should know is that a LOT of ink is wasted during the cleaning cycle. Many of these printers contain a little pump sucking inks through the nozzles of the head into... waste. But there also a secondary purpose for these cleaning cycles: to "shape" the "meniscus" which is required for a clean droplet formation.
So while it wastes ink, it also insures print quality then? If only the cartridges weren't being scalped on, that cleaning cycle thing probably wouldn't be discussed at all...
These hacks don't usually last long. Once the printer companies realize that you've been cheating on them, they'll release new versions to plug the vulnerability. Also, they can kill the reset feature with an update.
When refiling yourself, I recommend using Black 8ml only and color 5ml only. Why do I advise less than most of the videos around? Because the sponges inside get diluted over time, refilling with a little less makes them last longer.
The only issue I noticed after refilling these cartridges many times is that the head clogs/wears out and no amount of cleaning gives you a clear prints. I am talking about 20+ refills. Does not bother me too much for casual office work because I can always use a service for professional copies.
I stopped after 1:42, because there is an American clearly not understanding not only the metric system, but the difference between WEIGHT and VOLUME. Yes, we Europeans are smart enough to make water have a density so 1ml of water at standard conditions equals 1 g of water, but printer ink is MUCH DENSER! You cannot WEIGHT milliliters of something else than water. You have to WEIGHT THE WEIGHT, or MEASURE THE VOLUME!
Yes, nitpicking this is correct. Yet even with this approximation, that doesn't change the point, if ink is denser than water, that would mean for the same weight it's even less volume of ink than shown here with water. Obviously not acceptable if that would be for data collection / comparison or various benchmarks, but for just having a rough idea of how much ink it contains...
This is absolutely disgusting that they do this. I didn’t even know about the cleaning stage it does when you switch it off and on. Thanks for telling us about the reset. Deffo looking to get one of those ink tank printers when our current printer dies. Great video buddy.
That printer does. I worked for HP and HP machines do not do that. The reason why we tell people to never unplug or turn off their ink printers is because every few days the machine will drop a tiny bit of ink to keep the head fresh. This can also be avoid by printing a test page every 3 weeks. Another thing is why printers used a little bit of color, in that model that he had you can take off the color and make the machine exclusively black only. The tank ink printers SOUND nice but you have to understand what 5% coverage means so you can do the math. Because of that reason I only use instant ink with dual cartridges, it is the cheapest option.
That stop button feature is probably a developer mode so they can test the printer without costing themselves that much money. But yeah drilling a hole, refilling yourself and taping over the hole seems like an amazing fix.
The stop button feature has been around for years on Canon printers that use cartridges with a print head on them as opposed to the ink tank type, when a cartridge is close to running out (according to indicated ink levels) you get a message on your computer screen actually telling you to hold the stop/cancel button down for 5 seconds to continue printing, granted it's quite a long message but within it it tells you what to do.
I repair all manner of electrical items and IJ printers are no exception. I recently replaced a faulty printhead in a HP all in one, these printers have vacuum pumps inside them that make a numming sound when about to print a document, that sound is costing you a fortune as it is sucking expensive ink out of the cartridges and dumping it via thin rubber tubes onto a blotting pad inside the printer.
You have two more problems with your advice. Ink reservoirs have a finite amount of ink they can store. Some printers keep track of this and disable printing abilities once the reservoir is full. Some eco-tank printers have replaceable reservoirs because of this, but most are non serviceable. Second and most important is that ink cartridges are designed in such a way that inducing an air vent at the top (drilling a hole) will cause the ink to flow differently through the cartridge and possibly cause the head to gradually leak ink. Kind of like drilling a hole on the bottom of a milk carton and not much milk comes out until you drill a vent at the top and it all comes spilling out the bottom. I used to get excited about refilling cartridges, but after many battles with many printers I now refuse to ever buy an inkjet again! I'll just let the local drugstore make prints for me for a few cents each as I often get promotional emails to get 40% to 70% off photo prints (almost all major drugstore chains offer this to get you in the store).
Does the "stop button trick" also clear the counter that makes a printer unusable after printing x-thousand sheets? Manufacturers say that's because the sponge that swallows the ink gets full and it might spill ink. So the printer will be disabled.
As a sales and technician of inkjet printers, I always inform the customer the difference between CIS (continuous ink system) and cartridge type printer. If you use the printer casually, the cartridge type is for you. Because the cartridge type printer is not easy to dry the ink of because it's sealed inside the cartridge. And the continuous ink system is designed for massive printout and cheaper refillable inks. And because it is called CIS, you need to use it often. If not used for a long time, the ink may dry out or backflow back to the ink tank that may cause a not good quality printout and may damage the printer head. Btw, using fake ink or different models of ink may also damage your printerhead, because printerhead has a designated ink or compatible ink for it. Using fakes may have clogged the nozzle of the printerhead. And may cost you more for replacement. And that's the good side of using cartridge type printers, specially canon and hp because its printerhead is also the cartridge. If the printout gets disfigured, all you need to do is replace the cartridge that's also the printerhead of HP and canon printers. The only badside is low amount of printout and higher price of ink cartridges. What's all I know about the inkjet printer. Choose wisely that suits your needs. (Please understand, not mock my english. I'm not good at this, thanks to auto correct and grammar correct of my android gboard. 😂)
After years struggling with ink jet printers (don't print for a while? ha, gata clean the heads), so years ago my dad got a color laser printer (I can't recall the brand), and it seemed to go through the color toner quite quickly, even though we only really printed black, which was odd. When you held a page up to a bright light, at an angle, sure enough, there was a very light yellow dusting over the entire page. It was depositing a little bit of color on every page. Switched to brother laser B&W, and now my dad, I, his wife, have a combined like, 5 or 6, and we couldn't be happier. Can find them 2nd hand for like, $50-100, and after a few years, we buy a toner cartridge, everyone wins. After using them, I would never switch back to ink jet, even if ink wasn't a scam.
I buy my printers based on ink prices, not printer prices. I rather spend $500 on a printer if I get 5000 pages for $100 worth of cartridges vs 100 pages for $50 work of cartridges. But I'm a fairly heavy printer user so I can make use of this
Yes, you CAN see a difference between pure black text and text printed with color too. Its small but the text is generally perceived as smoother. Its small, the difference is there, but we should have the option to turn off that setting. Printers don't 'count' pages, but they do count drops of ink to estimate ink levels. I personally use and sell Epson EcoTank printers in my shop, and the cost per page is essentially zero with a set of 4 colors being about $45 total and each color having 70ml. Canon and HP have similar printers but they use a thermal print-head so wear out extremely quickly compared to Epson's piezo nozzles which literally last 6-7 years. You can easily get replacement waste ink tanks for epson too, but not canon or hp.
That trick is for select few Canons printer only. I tried it like 10 years ago on mine and it wouldn't work. Then I bought an Eco tank from Epson, there early version. It was last one on sale for $200. Best money spent, bought the big bottles and I am still going with them. It has been at least 7 years now. Now I print off my own note paper, planner, weekly planner, and even books, like instruction manuals for electronics and stuff. I just need to remember to clean it a little more often but I love this thing. Once you get an eco tank like this, it really frees you up.
In my experience, the cheaper the printer, the dearer the ink and not just at checkout, but over all use. I now have a Epson wf7840 A3+ (bought for the A3+, 13inches² & 4 cartridges black, blue, magenta & yellow all separate) and 2 years later so far so good.
Last time I bought InkJet printer was....it was Epson InkJet Stylus Photo 700...that experience alone prevented me to ever even think about ink-jet tech.
I’m a commercial printer with essentially a scaled up versions of inkjet printers (prints sheets or rolls 10’ wide). There truly are some bases for the seemingly absurd aspects (such as using cmy mixed with black), but it’s often just a suboptimal settings configuration chosen for the job at hand.
This made me miss my old dot matrix printer I gave away over decade ago when I was moving. It was noisy as hell, the resolution was so bad that you couldn't use smallest fonts, but I got it free as used, and it never run out of ink in my use (couple of pages like once at few months for over decade).
Just needed to comment on one thing: When you printed the black text with color under it, did you have the driver set for color or black&white printing? Most printers will put some color nick under black when printing in color mode, generally as an attempt to either get a more solid black area or to make the black color look a little more neutral (a lot of black inks and toner have just a bit of a shift toward red or blue if you compare them to a totally neutral black and the color ink can be used to correct for this). Usually, if you print in black&while mode the printer will use only the black ink and no color ink. Going a bit deeper, if you look in the driver there are also likely settings in the color tab that will allow you to control the use of the color ink when printing black even in the color mode. It’s generally called something like “use black ink only”. You can turn this on to save on using color inks for printing black when printing in color mode, possibly at a slight loss in image quality where black appears in the middle of something like a color image. But the best thing to do is always make sure the driver is set to black&white mode (sometimes revered to as monochrome mode or gray scale mode) when you just want to print black and white pages. Of course the actual amount of usable ink in a cartridge seems absolutely ridiculous. It like selling you a 20 ounce soft drink, but rigging the bottle so you can only get 2 or 3 ounces out of the bottle, but still claiming it’s a 20 ounce bottle. Btw, if you look at the standards the printer industry uses, you’ll find that the standard test page used for measuring how many pages an ink or toner cartridge can print is a page of something like H’s that only cover something like 5% of the page with ink, so an image that covers the whole page is the equivalent of about 20 of these “standard” pages. And that’s for black & white. It’s worse for color, since in images you probably have an average of at least two colors everywhere, so that’s like the equivalent of 40 of the “standard” pages. This 5% measurement isn’t exactly any type of a secret. The testing procedures are available online as a standard. But you’ll find manufacturers mention it in tiny print at the end of the specs, if at all! Hope this is useful to someone.
Thanks for sharing this info, I have tried to fill my HP ink-jet printer cartridge numerous times but found that the new printers have this function where it records the level of ink when you install new cartridge, so even if I fill the ink in an empty cartridge, the status of the cartridge shows the same that it is empty and needs to be replaced, it was really annoying and costly at the same time because the printer was not able to print, even 10 pages perfectly full of ink . 6 months back i bought a HP ink tank 585 printer ,and ever since I have not refilled even a single drop of ink of my printer, I have printed a lot of coloured pages ranging from glossy papers to a 4 size papers and every time I print in colour ,so it is my suggestion to all the people out there to better go for ink-tank printers without any hesitation as it will be cheaper for you in the long run.
There should be real ACTUAL regulations about stuff like this. It's nothing but landfill and waste, but of course us regular people are the ones who need to use paper straws.
True - but in all honesty, 99.99999% of all printing is waste as well. Unless you are creating the next Magna Carta or the next Mona Lisa, then eventually, your document will end up in the trash at some point.
@@markd.9538 I respectfully disagree. Knowledge printed into books are the backbone of civilization.
Million years from now and with gods help when we fly through space we will still have physical media depicting information.
Now, we can argue if all information is worth printing, but that's a slippery slope argument.
europe should do this like they did with apple and usb c
@@alf3071 you mean the eu, and we didnt do it for apple, every device has to use usb-c,
laptops, toothbrushes etc, apple is just the only one playing the victim^^
Noooooooopoooo regulation is bad, it stop competition and let the bad government control our life.
I used to be a tech journalist, and my Canon printer refused to scan the documents because there was no ink. I made a Facebook post calling out the bs and magically the PR manager gave me the combination to overwrite this limitation. Needless to say this code was not publicly available in any consumer documentation I could find, and I ony got a resposnse because the PR managers were keeping an eye on what I post because I was a journalist. This was in 2014. We need right to repair laws asap, it's getting worse by the day
So what's the code?
@@Voyajer. 1234ABC
I think HP is going though a lawsuit with some guy for this very reason too
@voyajer it was likely a code for a 2013 model printer, I doubt it would work on modern printers
We need a "right to not be screwed over by greedy corporations" law.
It's pretty incredible that people keep discovering and exposing this scam, and then the public collectively forgets about it. It's on a cycle like once every 3 years or so.
Because most ppl bearly print anything, those that do learn a trick like this one and move on. 3 years later new ppl that print Comes in and discover the trick and repeat.
Printing might become niche before this ever gets resolved. Can't wait for affordable e-ink displays and handhelds to become standard.
Makes me want to become a scammer. Seems like its legal
Just use the office printer. If you don't work in an office, surely a friend or family member does lol
@@evenjesuscantsaveyouanymor6163 I bought a good older used HP Laserjet printer and clone toner cartridges cost me around $20.00 and last for thousands of pages with excellent print quality, sure it's only black and white but I find I very rarely need color, and if I do I can go to the office works.
When the chip shortage was happening during COVID, HP actually publicized the reset feature because it was literally impossible for them to get the chips that tell the printer it’s running out.
It was Canon actually.
The reset feature is due to the law suit settled by HP. It required that all printers have an override feature that allows you to continue using your cartridge even when the printer says it is empty. I have been printing for 4 years now with "empty" cartridges in my HP laser jet.
Hi, so i recently picked up a HP envy 5660 inkjet I checked the firmware and it seems to be offline for a little over 3 years, date today is Dec 2023. it was 9 months ago HP unexpectedly sent out the cartridge blocking update. I feel like there's a good chance i may beable to do what Fstoppers YT suggests refill cartridges. So how can I do this on this model? that hasn't recieved their horrendous HP blocking firmware. Please mention if you experienced or seen HP envy 5660 using a DIY refilled cartridge and KNOW a way to bypass refill check on lower frmwares.
please tell how to refill 3rd party cartridges withut tripping the refill check. if you do trip the refill check i heard it can hault the printer from using ink. i've printed with it so i know this has not occured. btw my black and white printer is a Brother MFC-L2700DW and ofcourse if this refill myth as shown is actually hurting customers as shown I better be making sure to never continue buying scam cartridges in stores. i mean it shouldn't even be legal for those to be sold with 3 or less mililiters of ink and advertized as 12 and higher.
Sure wish my Brother printer had this feature.
what's the secret button to reset the error?
But there is no way to know which printers have a reset.
@@3DJapan It does, it's just hidden somewhere that's not known to most people.
My parents had an HP printer not long ago, where every couple of days the printer would demand to be recalibrated. To do so, it would always print these highly detailed and graphical instructions on how to take the printed piece of paper and place it in the scanner... This printed piece of paper was always the highest quality print and use up a quarter of the Cartridge of both the black and color ink. This industry is corrupt as hell and warrants an investigation by the FTC....
My dad has a 2720 and after following the instructions and scanning it in, it never wanted to do that again unless he'd put in a different cartridge.
đọc chả hiểu mẹ gì
Oh yea, I bet the FTC will be busting down their doors, once they see this, in no-time. WAKE TO THE FAKE SHEEPLE!
Unfortunately the FTC is corrupt as hell too
We have a similar HP printer, we bought cartridges 2 times, after which we realised it was useless, so we got bottles of ink, and we inject the ink when the cartridges dries up it works pretty well, and the ink is also cheap, we are using the same cartridge from last 3 yrs
A few years ago, I found it was hugely cheaper to buy a replacement printer than to buy replacement ink cartridges. Those Canon Pixma printers were about $25 brand new and then the ink was well over $80 for a set. Maybe we should just build houses out of empty printers.
If he had spent $150 +/- he would have got a printer with cartridges that could print 2,500 pages. The lesson is, don't be such a tightwad.
@@BornAgainCynic0086 You want to spend $150 for a printer when you can spend $16 and get more prints than the $150 printer will produce? Do you work for printer company by chance because your math doesn't add up.
@@readhistory2023 Concentrate, I am referring to the cheap bit of junk he bought. I have been retailing printers to users for over 30 years. The ink tank printers are good for what they are, but I repair them weekly, they are unreliable for many people.
@@BornAgainCynic0086if he hadn't wasted so much money trying to replace ink cartridges so often as in the example in this video, he wouldn't have to consider buying new printers each time to save money on the print jobs that those should be doing from the first set of cartridges. The lesson is, don't be so unsympathetic.
When I was in the Army in 2008-2011, Soldiers would buy a printer, and then when they quickly ran out of ink, they balked at buying a new cartridge that cost as much as a printer--so they didn't do anything.
As far as we knew, the cartridge that came with the printer contained less than the replacements, but how much less?
THIS is the video I've been waiting for that vindicates my unbridled hatred for printers
Same here! It's impressive how these companies are scamming us.
Every IT person hates printers
I hate them too buddy 😂🤣
EVERYONE'S BEEF IS WITH INKJET PRINTERS AND TANK PRINTERS. LASER PRINTERS GET A PASS.
But how fast head will start to mess prints? In old cannon they failed after just 2 refils. While hp could print solid until 1500 pages after significant quality drop in printer head.
My printer remembers the cartridge so refilling doesn't work BUT I found a way around that. I have two sets of cartridges, when it runs out I refill the previous cartridge and put that in. I can do this on an endless loop as the printer seems to only remember the cartridge that was just in it.
Shhhh... 5:56 Now Canon is going to issue a firmware update to "fix" that bug.
A few observations from my side
1. I’ve been a poor student in the 2000s and I needed to print quite a lot of stuff, so I bought a second-hand BW inkjet printer and a set of cartridges for it for about $50 (note that it was 20 years ago) and that I’m from the central EU. These cartridges served me for FIVE YEARS. Of course I’ve been refilling them (spent around 1-2 liters of ink) but these were exceptionally resilient.
2. The sponge (or the “diaper” as we called it). There was no warning, it just started leaking. Disassembled, cleaned the sponge, dried it, installed back, that’s it.
3. My friend installed poor man’s “ink tank” pipes into his Canon (drilled the cartridges, installes pipes and connected to ink tanks). Worked like a charm, but started leaking when we printed a lot, A LOT of photographs.
Inkjet printers are scam, but if you are ready to get your hands dirty (literally) you can outsmart the scammer.
1. I have used inkjet printers a lot in the past. 1 thing i notice is that even if you refill them, the cartridges don't last past 3-4 refill cycles. the print quality starts to degrade (colours go off, lines and waves start to appear) and the reason is because the print head has a fixed lifespan and sometimes the nozzles get clogged and cannot get clean properly.
2. the sponge under the reservoir became as hard as a piece of pvc after a few years and refused to absorb any ink. sure i could take it out and wash it but the next time the printer switches on, it gets soaked again.
3. I also tried drilling the cartridges with a DIY inkjet-to-ink-tank conversion, did not work well for me because the cartridges are not designed for a constant high volume/high pressure of ink weighing on the print head, so the ink just started haemorrhaging all over the inside of the printer.
all these was enough for me to call it quits.
was on a canon mp198 though, that thing was ancient so maybe the new inkjets are more resilient.
that, plus nowadays used colour laser printers can be had relatively cheaply
toner does not leak or vomit over the pages
toner lasts forever, no need to worry about print head drying out
no need to worry about mis-prints or misalignment
enough to convince me to switch.
the only things i feel that inkjet still trumps lasers are 1) electricity cost and 2) printing of photos or detailed colour prints eg magazine or poster prints.
and even so, epson prints better photos than canon.
Can't you print at you university? I do it costs 0.05€ for a BW page and 0.1€ for colour.
Inkjet printers aren't as big a scam as people think - just buy the one that suits your needs!! The $48 printer in this video is designed for very limited home use. Yes you can keep refilling the ink cartridge and keep using it for a long while but honestly a typical user will not be expected to do this. This printer is designed to just work with the most basic methods. No ink? Replace cartridge. Blocked inkjet head? replace cartridge. You pay for the convenience with these machines. I do agree though they absolutely can put more ink in the things!!
The fact that you used the printer enough to fill the sponge says that you used the printer beyond its designed lifecycle. You should then purchase a printer than has a replaceable waste ink box - a printer rated for a longer life & duty cycle. The more you spend on a printer the more you realise that printing can be way more cost effective in normal use.
The sponge also may not have given you a warning as you kept refilling the same cartridge, in normal use the printer will keep track of how many cartridges used and how many cleaning cycles. No doubt it's most likely that the printer would not have given a warning regardless but you can't fault the printer if you use it outside specifications without knowing otherwise.
People truly underestimate how complex a printer actually is from the point you press print to when the final page comes out. As a printer technician it bothers me most with cheap paper - that's the real scam!! Users buy the cheapest paper and blame the machine or myself when it jams continuously, the quality looks shit and wonder why the printer is so unreliable from all the cheap paper dust that is coating every square inch inside the machine. You may save some money on cheap paper but you'll be paying it back in parts and service costs.
@@namele55777Sometimes they are able to detect that the cartridges were refilled (~DRM maybe) and wont print.
@@-alan-- oh of course, whatever I said above is assuming you managed to get past the low warning override in the first place.
There is one potential problem, and it would be nice to see if you encounter it: each time the printer cleans the heads, that ink goes into a reservoir - and if that reservoir is full, the printer may brick up with a horrible error message. This reservoir - usually a sponge - is also usually not replaceable. Given this printer seems to clean the print heads after each page, this might happen sooner than later. This is the reason I gave up on inkjets - apart from the cost of the ink - having to buy a new printer just because a sponge filled up...
Same here. I am tired of print head cleanup. I don't use it often. When I want to print a photo, the time wasted on cleanup is far more than printing the photo (including prepare and editing). After switching to color laserjet, my headache was gone.
Its called a waste ink pad, I mentioned it in the previous videos as it is one of the evil ways of printers making everything too diffilcut and expensive for end customer.
HOWEVER it can be reset ("hacked") with no consequences, as the ink usually dries - thats the reason printers are cleaning their heads. Refiling very cheap ink, reseting this allowed me to use a printer for 15years. Which is exactly how it should be, if companies werent evil.
I am pretty sure even the huge professional printers have this function. You have to use them every day or the printer head dries up and you have to buy a new one for hundreds of dollars. People have to set up automatic printing when they go on vacation so they don't break these pro equipment. It's the ink system. It sucks.
If the printer company had their way it would make printers only one-time use and throw away 🤣
Show us where to drill?
i bet they sell the printer at a loss to get the money back on the ink. what a scam.
I think folks call this the safety razor method. Give away the handle and make your profit on the blades. I knew one guy who bought a new $40 printer each time he was out of the ink that came with the printer. It was cheaper for him than buying new ink.
Absolutely brilliant, sell the old printer lol, or return it.@@jackmortimer329
This is exactly correct. It is becoming very common in other industries as well. Hint: don't take your car to a dealership for repairs- they make more money in the shop than they do on the sales floor.
Its sold at a huge loss even the cheapest printer probably costs about $250 to make ...
No Lol, Just No.. stop with the misinformation, they sell printer like they sell anything in the world, at a profit, but they aim for less profit to encourage sales and compensate by selling ink @@dgillies5420
This was eye-opening. I always knew printer companies relied on ink cartridge sales to cover their losses on printer sales (which they often sell at or below manufacturing cost), but I never realized the lengths they've gone to waste ink to boost cartridge sales. It's almost like how insurance companies seem to actively try to find ways to not pay out during claims.
@@AlexBarbu Thanks for your insights!
I also have Canon printer and I can confirm that it wastes huge amount of ink when it's doing the cleaning cycle. Every second time that i start the printer it is doing that for like 1 minute. After few years the sponge is completely soaking to the point I can't use colors anymore because it gets dirty from it every time. For some reason this is not a problem with only using black ink. At least not yet.
Cut the crap with the " sell at below manufacturing cost ".
No one is selling below manufacturing cost.
@@Reloadownreally? Playstation is doing the same. They sell the console under the manufacturing cost and take back that loss on the price of games. A game costs way more on Playstation compared to the pc-version of the same game. Same with printers. Those are cheap and they make profit by selling you ink cartridges. If you bought a printer once for only 50 euros and it comes with 1 black and 1 color cartridge, you'll understand. I've had such a printer and if you bought the cartridges separately, you paid 60 euros for 1 black cartridge and 80 euros for the color one. So both cartridges alone are 140 euros while the printer along with those cartridges is only 50 euros total. Even if the cartridges have about half the ink of a new cartridge, it's still cheaper to buy a new printer with cartridges than buying the cartidges separately.
@@Reloadownyep, cannon made on Vietnam so very cheap labour and made thousands of units ones. So they are very cheap. They never sold it with lose.
Everyone should share this on social media to create as much exposure and awareness as possible so we can end this nonsense, and maybe even begin class action lawsuits so people who have wasted tons of money on this scam can get a little something back.
I would share it myself, but I don't really use any social media platforms besides YT.
Agreed. That's what I'm going to do right now.
@@RaisDjampa Right on, thanks 👍
search for AustinMcConnell, he tried to do that 5 years ago and nothing changed. You underestimated the power of mega corporation, they can bend the law to fit their benefit.
A class action lawsuit over this? Wow you must be american.
@@itsgonnabeanaurfromme what other type of lawsuit would you suggest?
Be aware that there's another problem. All that "flushing" ink has to go somewhere and that's another foam pad in that Canon printer and the printer knows how much ink that can take and will FAIL when this non-consumable item is "fuill".
I am aware that some Ricoh printers have a user-replaceable waste ink container for precisely this purpose.
Of course, it's very hard to make a printer and sell it retail for $50 and make money, especially when you expect the retailer is buying it for 50% of that. These things are loss leaders trying to make their money on the Ink. Its a nasty practice and somewhat dishonest I feel. And don't get me started on the unnecessary environmental waste.
I had this same issue with my Brother laser printer and all I had to do is take out the waste tray open it up clean it and fiddle with a connector or something (I forgot it was two years ago). Kicker was that it wasn't even all that dirty inside barely 10-20% full! and they wanted me to buy another $35 waste toner box!
HP and Epson lets you replace the waste trays as well, on Epsons the ink sometimes spills over the side and messes with the electronics though.
Yes, on inkjet, this "container" is often a basically a diaper of padded material, and not easily accessible. And in my case I found a code to reset it, but it was still full and swollen, so after it swell even more, it bend and jammed the mechanics.
@@HoopyAmero Brother Laser printers have what's called a waste toner box, this is a cheap consumable item, last one I ordered was £20 and was good for 50000 prints and at least you can replace them easily and inexpensively, once the ink well in a domestic inkjet printer is full it's time to buy a new printer.
Cheap retail printers have a markup of between 5 and 20%.
The fact that it cleans the heads after every page is insane. Using color ink in the black text is also just a way to use ink quicker. I have an Epson Ecotank printer now. If I want a large high quality photo printed, i just use a service... no more ink carts for me!
Inkjet printers don't normally clean after every page, they will do a clean when you switch the printer on or wake up periodically and do a clean if the printer is left on but in standby mode but they don't clean after every page, this is definitely not normal. As for using the colour to print black, if you set to greyscale then they won't . The problem with Ecotank printers is you are paying a lot more for that privilege, generally a low end inkjet printer at higher end inkjet price, when they first come on the market you'd pay £200 for the ecotank version of a £40 printer, in other words the only difference was one had the ecotank compartment, the other took cartridges, otherwise exactly the same
@@luvstellauk Yes, the Ecotank costs more initially, but it comes with a full set of ink... probably more than $200 worth of comparable cartridges. If you print a lot, it makes much more sense. The fact that the printer in the video uses color ink for printing black text by default is a total money grab, and most people won't even be aware of it.
@@GetOffMyyLawn It costs what it actually costs to manufacture and sell with some profit margin. As opposed to a cartridge-based printer, which they sell for far less than would be economically viable by itself if they weren't extorting so much profit out of cartridges.
In the early/mid 2000's my buddy worked a locally owned store called "Rapid Refill". They would very professionally take ink cartages apart, fill them and resell them. People would either have theirs filled or swap with an already filled one. It was great business, but I think they got shut down by the manufactures of these ink cartridges, its hard to remember .
There was a chain of stores called Cartridge World that I used, but they disappeared too. I now get remanufactured cartridges from Ebay.
Most manufacturers put chips on their cartridges and update the firmware of the printers without the user knowledge remotely to prevent them from using recycled or compatible cartridges. HP is the worse in that field. Right now, they are pushing updates every 3 months to lock out the users from using 3rd party cartridges and also, once you get the firmware updated WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT, you cannot deactivate "automatic updating" because they remove the option from the machine.
@@N0D0hNuts Dreadful! My printer is a Brother, not the greatest printer I've ever had, but I have complete control.
@@zyxw2000 I got Brother printer recently and I'm very happy with it. Cheap ink, easy installation, decent tray for paper,...
I'm so happy I don't have to deal with ink scams. Getting a color laser printer in 2015 when it was on sale for $85 was one of the greatest decisions ever. I'm still using the included cartridges and they're 45% full. The toner cartridges may be more expensive to replace but they can print 4800 pages.
which printer is that?
@@Dexxxxxxxxx Lexmark CS410DN
Mind recommending me the model you got?
The model I got has been discontinued. You can get the Lexmark CS331 or C3326 instead.@@l-l
Atleast your not wasting ink on the cleaning ink scam that's on most ink jet printers.
Update... I watched this video 4 months ago when it came out. Like many, I had experienced much of the same frustration you describe, but without knowing the true extent of the underlying issues. A couple weeks ago I ditched my cartridge printer and got a tankless printer. Just wanted to thank you for exposing this issue is a straight-forward, methodical manner.
The stop/cancel button trick for this type of Canon printer is well documented, this has been the case on various generations of Canon printer (where the printhead is part of the cartridge) for the 15 or so years I've worked in the industry. The message that comes up on your computer screen when the cartridge is empty tells you to do this to continue printing because what actually happens is the machine stops and lets you know that a cartridge is low, once you over ride the message it will not warn you again for that particular cartridge and you can continue printing until the quality deteriorates.
Fantastic tests man. FYI...most modern printers are designed to completely stop working when that "reservoir" you mentioned is full. In most cases, this will happen automatically after 7 years even if the printer is fully functional and that "reservoir" is empty and dry. What a scam.
Don't quote me on that, but I saw a video on TH-cam about Epson ecotank which shows that this reservoir is actually serviceable, i.e. you can switch the sponge inside.
@@questcoast Replacing it at least in the newer generation is very easy, even if you are not supposed to be able to do that as lay person for the entry level devices. Sadly, you will also need a reset program. Consider this part of the running cost and add like 20% to the ink cost.
@@questcoast higher end Ecotanks sell you a chipped reservoir that you have to work with, but the cheapest Ecotank has a pad and the classic full stop error message.
Might explain the strange behaviour of my printer throwing errors suddenly.
My ancient Epson ecotank L365 (about 8 years) still works decently enough, had to clean that reservoir a couple of years back, it was basically just unscrewing a Phillips head and shifting the compartment to one side so it could fall down and clean the sponge inside, I don´t remember but I believe I had to reset it as well. Not exactly the greatest but at least they don't sell their ink as if it was one of the rarest substance on earth.
Thank You! These types of videos are not only appreciated, but are also a necessity in today's out-of-control corporate greed.
My experience with ecotank (epson) printers has been that the actual printer breaks before you run out of ink. So either way they get you, you either buy ink or you buy a whole new printer because they're built as cheaply as possible.
can confirm, I got one of those starter 3 in 1 and the Printer broke down more then the ink ran out, the result is indeed beautiful and the cost to ink ratio great.
but having to take the printer every month just to unclog or fix something else was too much.
The solution to Epson printers is to buy the real expensive ones that are made for Industry use, those can last years before going bad in any manner.
But again those cost upwards of 1500$ so your paying a lot one way or the other.
The only problem I have with my Epson is that the nozzle gets dirty every month, but mine still works great even after 6 years
There is a "waste reservoir" where all of that ink cleaned from the head goes. (It's usually a foam pad inside the printer)
You will also need to replace this eventually or risk having a puddle of used ink inside the printer, or sometimes get an printer error for full waste reservoir.
The other scam is that foam pad is just.... well a foam pad, there is no sensor in it, on it or anywhere around it. Yet at some point it spews out an error that it is full and to (of course) bring it in for repair. In reallity it just counts printed pages and at some point invites to get fleeced in the repair center. That is also the reason those ink-tank printers (also mentioned in the video) are worthless. It may hold a lot of ink but you are gonna get charged regularly to basically clear an error code which you can't clear yourself in order to continue printing.
I also have Canon printer and this sponge got completely soaking after few years to the point that i can't print colors anymore because it will always gets dirty from it and the print looks like crap. For some reason using only black ink still works fine.
I was also looking for the way to replace that sponge but i would have to dissasemble everything to get to the whole thing. And i don't know if i can still even buy it.
I cleaned mine, and it would still give me the same error code. It is written in the softer to give you the error service code.
What others do is they drill a hole at the back and find a small rubber hose inside and pipe it out so the ink is drained outside directly and not onto that pad. Of course this should be done before that sensor is triggered.
you don't need to drill a hole, there is already a tiny hole that you can stick the needle under the sticker. if you have big hole, you might experience leaking from the print head. also make sure you re-attach the sticker back on exactly at the same spot. i refill my canon cartridge like this for years and never have problem after the reset.
I usually try to find the hole by touching and pressing the stickers, and fill the ink using syringe, after that cover the hole using a tape... Works like a charm
@@ZXZZ66_ which ink do you use ? Can you tell ?
How to do a "reset" after refilling?
I've worked for an aftermarket printer ink company for almost 20 years. Each cartridge has a different yield, though most cartridges have their pages rated at 5% coverage. I've seen some brands even quantify it is 3.5% or 4% coverage. If you condensed all your print into a block half the size of a playing card, you're using 5% of your page = 1 page off your page count. (As you saw, you get less "pages" when you print more on your page, so it's just a way to quantify the amount of prints you could expect. Though in all fairness, people often use more than 10-15% of their page, equally 2-3 pages off the cartridges total.)
Cartridges are quite expensive, though you'd find through the years they've always been about the same price, despite most other consumables going up in price. The way they make this happen is by giving you less ink in the cartridge. This resulted in cartridges that are basically filled with 3ml of ink. 5 years ago 5ml was pretty standard, 10 years ago 8ml was pretty standard, 20 years ago, you could find cartridges that contained 20ml+ of ink. The truth is that the cost is mostly in the body of the cartridge. And if they can't really make a lot off one sale, they'll try to make a little of a lot of sales. The type of cartridge in your video contains all of the important printing components. An analogy I often use: Imagine every time you need gas, it's like replacing your whole gas tank. This is your situation. (It may sound funny, but most OEM generally overfill cartridges by ~10-25%, compared to their page rating, because if you had a cartridge that was supposed to print 250 pages @ 5% coverage, and started having quality issues around page 240 @5% coverage, you have a valid reason to complain. Maybe they're doing that less and less now days, as you really should have gotten 5 fully black pages out of a PG-275 cartridge with it's 100 page @5% coverage rating. Canon also lists this cartridge as having 5.6ml, so if you only got 3ml out of it, the remainder of the ink is still saturated in the sponge and may or may not eventually gravitate toward the printhead.)
I know you think you disproved this, but cartridges generally don't have the ability to sense actual ink levels. It IS calculating the wasted ink being used to prime the cartridge. It's just an estimate though, and those estimates can be/will be off. This is partially why an override (as performed in your video) is available as an (mostly hidden) option to keep using the cartridge. They estimate based on a countdown. You can think of this in this way: You install a cartridge, the printer recognizes a serial number from the cartridge. As you use the cartridge, the number of pages it calculates/associates with that serial number counts down to nothing. (This is how you could pop in multiple cartridges of varying levels, and the machine still provides the "accurate" ink level of each cartridge.) Printer's used to have very limited memory, so you could tape over some electronics, pop it back in, remove it, tape over some other contacts, remove it, take off the tape, and the printer would suddenly have forgotten the ink level associated with that cartridge. Obviously, today, memory is not limited anymore. You could install a thousand cartridges, and your printer will still recognize the previous calculated level on any of them.
Some Brother inkjet cartridges do have a mechanical check. Basically as the ink goes down, a float covers a window, when that window is obscured, the cartridge will read as empty. (They used this in place of electronics that work as described above.) However, this is still not actual detection of ink throughout it's use. Just that it is or is not empty. The cartridges in your video do have a secondary check though. Something akin to a fuse. If you bring the actual ink below a certain level (say 25%) the "fuse" pops. When I sell refill kits for these cartridges, I have to point out to customers that you really really want to refill before you reach 50% ACTUAL ink. And I usually use the analogy of a car with a broken gas gauge. Take it set amount miles then top it off. If you don't do this you'll eventually have an error reading that states something like "damaged cartridge."
Printers often use color even when only printing in black. This is because after they're removed from their packaging and installed, they're constantly being exposed to air. Cartridges drying out after you've printed only a few pages because they've been sitting in your printer for 6 months without use is a legitimate problem that manufacturers try to avoid. There's also a priming process, every time you print a page. I know this is wasteful, but if it didn't do this priming process, you may run into quality issues. Say you haven't used your printer lately, and instead of the printer priming it just goes straight to printing out the photograph you want to print. Odds are fairly good that you'll have wasted even more ink, because the first few passes printed out poorly and now you have to reprint the whole thing. This is also the reason you want to keep your printer on at all times. Yes, it will occasionally prime and waste some ink, but it's just keeping it "fresh" for the moment you decide to use it.
On printers where the printhead is part of the machine, you can permanently clog/damage your machine if the printhead does not have ink flowing properly. The printhead contains thousands and thousands of pores regulated by heat resistors. Whenever those heat resistors are activated, but ink is not flowing through to keep them cool, they have a good chance of overheating and burning out permanently. Just going to give a simplified example: Lets say you have a 100x100 (10,000) grid of heat resistors. During a print job you run out of ink in the middle of a page. You may have burnt out 1000 of those resistors, that's 10% of the printing capability of that cartridge that will NEVER work again. 10% might not even be noticeable to the average person, once you start accumulating more and more damage, it will become noticeable if you refill the cartridge. (In this example, you could burn out 0, or 1k, or 3k, or all 10k, or really anything in between. And your print would be missing a corresponding amount of print permanently. You could think of it like running a car engine without oil.)
This is also the reason that remanufactured cartridges are often considered lower quality. Remanufacturers get these cartridges and have to judge what's acceptable to refill/resell. It's very rarely 100% working, as a significant portion of people don't replace/recycle cartridges before there is some symptom of failure. It can be really hard to notice a cartridge that has only 5% damage to the printhead, but much easier to notice a cartridge has 25% damage resulting in 25% of the print is missing.
(Sorry for the extra long comment, I could honestly write a book on this topic...)
You missed the point about the priming function, it does it after every page, not only when you turn it on, or for the first few, or just for the first page.
Thanks for the info, it is very useful insight into the system.
@@drudan8957 It's not a standard function of every inkjet printer, even if the one shown in the video does it after ever page. Lots of printers have different quirks. Most prime on wake/start up. it's also common for them to prime on the first print in a given timeframe. Some prime randomly every few hours or days, and it would seem that some even prime on every page. However, every page is certainly not normal for a majority of inkjet printers that have ever existed. It could be argued that this is a design to waste ink, but it could also be argued that it's required by the design of the cartridge to achieve the best overall results even if it's at the expense of wasting some ink. It's easy to see the negatives here, but you have to realize that there's often a logical reason behind it. Waste a relatively small amount of ink for priming OR waste an entire page/picture worth of ink because there was poor print on the first inch or two.
I'll fully agree that OEM ink companies, like most large companies, are in the business of sucking out as much money from you as possible, but I don't think that they're purposefully being extra malicious about it at EVERY turn. Using priming to provide quality prints, not malicious. However, putting 5.6ml in a cartridge that could hold 15ml, is a different story. (Bulk ink really isn't expensive enough to be used as an excuse to only put 5.6ml in a cartridge. Even at the small quantities my company purchases, we're talking 5 gallons for ~$140. I can't even imagine how much of a bulk rate Canon receives.... Then they put 1/3500 of that into a cartridge and charge $20-30-40-50 per cartridge. Honestly, that's probably the most outrageous thing about the ink business.) Just as it was exaggerated in the video, everyone believes/jokes that ink is more expensive by weight than gold, and printing companies use this belief as an open door to unapologetically charge so much for such little ink.
@@pendragon00thank you for posting what I was trying to get into words. This sort of extreme “conspiracy!” clickbait video is just based on ill informed lay persons “knowledge” without bothering to explore the engineering principles, constraints or motivations behind some of these designs.
My area is the waste ink aspect which is often described as “planned obsolescence” and the myths there are equally bad.
Anyway, I doubt very much a considered response to this video or topic would get a fifth of the views and shouts of “you’re part of this” would likely follow… *sigh*
Thank you for your comment. I've been working in a laser cartridge recycling company for the past 12 years and everything you said is spot on. You did a better job at explaining this than me. I would just like to point out : Remanufactured cartridges are lower quality in inkjet. In the laser world, if you get a good company that recycle and remanufacture cartridges the correct way, you get a product that is as good as the OEM. The correct way to recycle a toner cartridge is to replace every part that can and will wear down then refill it with toner. Some place just put new toner in them which is no good. The % of return / defective cartridge for original HP is 5%. We actually have a 4% return rate and we include free service if a cartridge would fail, at our own expense. We do that to prove to the customers that we know our products are good and to not be brainwashed by the big corp saying "remanufactured toner cartridge will harm your printer"
Description unclear, filled a cartridge with the hot sauce
Also a great option: Canon printers that are a bit more expensive with separate color cartridges that don't change the head when you change cartridge. There are transparent, after-market cartridges on the market, that allow very easy refilling without drilling any holes on the cartridge. You buy a liter of ink of every color and you print everything. Too lazy to refill? No problem. Instead of refilling, you can simply change the cartridges with non-originals for 0.30-0.50€. Very nice video. Good work.
I don't know about canon, but epson printers had their ink reservoir on the outside of the inner parts and refillable since years ago, no more custom made reservoir by drilling the cartridge.
Buying third party ink cartridges is also a great option for many printers. Quality of ink does vary, but they definitely last a long time.There are a several sites which do have these shady ink cartridges for fractionally lower prices. I'm pretty happy with mine.
You said 35 and my mind just about exploded. I knew i had made a smart decision buying a color laser printer as a college freshman as my essays spat out from its mouth at light speed before my classes, little did i know that thanks to 3rd party toner cartridges, it would play a big role in keeping my business profitable 13 years later 👌
I also ALWAYS tell people to print b&w if its not a photo. Often times if you dive into the printer driver settings, theres a hidden greyscale setting, vs trying to trust ones word processing or browser application to know how to set the printer to what i call "hard grayscale."
Rich black can be useful but fuck it wastes ink with word docs. Mostly you only need it for graphic design work with blacks butting against rich colors, plain K black looks empty next to bright colors without some CMY mixed in.
There is a special paper being sold for presentation purposes or if you want the highest quality print. It is extra white with some primer or something on it, it does produce beautiful prints. I can tell you from experience that using that paper instead of the regular one makes a whole lot more of a difference than using color on B/W prints or not. And it is cheaper as the paper is not that much more expensive than the regular paper.
Laser printers have their uses, but I personally prefer the look of injet prints, seems more vibrant to me. If you want a hassle-free experience, laser is definetly the way to go, though.
That's my biggest complaint about ink. How few sheets are printed.
This is why years ago I switched to a toner based printer. However I do understand that toner isn't always the best for certain types of printing, however in my experience those are in the 1% exceptions for most of my printing needs. Now toner based printers are not without their "waste" faults, but they are far more minimal compared to ink printing. Also toner doesn't "go bad" or dry up.
In case anyone is wondering, he's referring to a laser printer. I've never heard anyone calling it a 'toner-based printer' before this.
The end of this video is amazing. You may have just saved me a small fortune. Literally. If they had any heart at all or were just kind of fair, I would be a happy customer
FYI, some printers (HP if I’m not mistaken) actually keep track of how much ink has been ejected into the cleaning area. Then when the printer believes that area is full, it disables itself.
I've similar canon printer. Can you please tell me which ink to buy ?
All printers have to deal with excessive material. For inkjets, it's a sponge for ink used during head cleans, for laser printers it is a container for toner that didn't get fully fused.
For inkjets there is no good technical solution for actually measuring how full the sponge is and users would make hell of a fuzz if the sponge ended up being full. So the existence of the sponge is not the problem. The problem is that most cheaper printers don't consider the sponge user-servicable. It needs some care like putting some paper under the device and wearing gloves, but it is not hard to do. There is no reason why a 10EUR replacement part shouldn't be available and just work. For some printers, reset programs are available though.
For laser printers, it is a bit easier as the toner powder is solid and can be measured e.g. with a light sensor. Some models include the waste toner container in the toner cartridge, for others it is a separate box. Not all of them provide a replacement either and I'd argue that having to empty it by hand is an actual health hazard.
One thing I'd like to point out that I don't think I've seen posted here, the reason why when you're using colour ink when printing "blank" pages is because most printers using a yellowish tint on every print. These are used to track what printer you used, and what time it was printed. It's used for law enforcement to sometimes track criminals. It's not super well known but I think that it's still useful information to some of you. :)
Came to the comments to mention this very thing. Beat me to it.
It's also to keep the color print head from drying out and clogging up (I think it could be solved without blowing ink, but that might cost them a few cents to a dollar), AND because rich black (black including CMY) actually DOES look different on higher quality papers - K alone looks a bit flat and bluish by comparison.
One time I tried to scan and print a $20 bill and my printer printed a warning that it was illegal to do that and printed a link to a website "for more info". I was stupid enough to go to that website, I think they caught and stored my IP when I went to that link.
For tracking counterfeiting money with inkjet printers.
Wow, creepy. This is only a thing with inkjet printers (not laser), right?
I have printed about 5000 pages on my $50 laser printer. Refilling the cartridge is so easy and way less expensive than buying new ones every time
This is a great hack. I gave up on inkjets 15yrs ago. Been using a black and white laser since.
Ive been meaning to buy an inkjet for printing photos but always been put off by cartridge prices.
You might find that having your photos printed at Walmart is an affordable option.
That fix by canon to continue using cartridges after they are detected as empty by the system is actually a feature. A message will pop up telling you to press a particular button for a certain amount of time if you wish to continue using the now detected "empty" cartridge. You can continue refilling those cartridges until the head fails and print quality deteriorates. Some cartridges such as the PG810 and CL811 can be refilled several times and can print a lot of pages before head failure.
Just to put it into perspective: I just did the math with a set of 11.2 ml Canon ink cartidges (68 Dollars) and a 1.5 liter bottle of 2010 Dom Perigon (626 Dollars). The ink is $6.07 per milliliter, while the Dom Perignon is a mere $0.42 per milliliter. That means that desktop printer ink is 14x (!) more expensive than a premium champagne!
moreover you cannot drink it!
Try getting scales that go down to tenths or lower of a gram. Then when you do the cleaning test, you can see exactly how much ink it uses just to do the cleaning.
That fool does not even know the difference between volume (ml) and weight (g). Do you really think he knows what "below grams" is?
@@der.Schtefan bruh, his scale was clearly in a volume/milliliters mode, with the text "ml" on the display and a picture of a water droplet.
The milliliter mode wouldn't be accurate in ink because it's by weight and ink has a different density than water
i was also slightly miffed by lack of milligram measurement@@der.Schtefan
@@EricChiEric This was exactly my first thought, but the difference in density is just so much, that it is not really relevant for this: Water at 20C - 0.99802 g/cm2, Black ink at 20C - 1.0743 g/cm2, so not even 0.1g/cm2 difference. But he should have 100% definitely comment on this, so people who know that different fluids have different density don't need to go and do research by themselves.
This is so infuriating and everybody knows we're being screwed over. Thanks so much for clarifying and/but what do we do to change this ridiculous system?
Yeah, that laws are so lax that they can get away with this scam for decades.
Easy: Buy the cheap printer and then never buy a single cartridge (refill them instead). If enough people do that, they have to change their business model.
@@james_halpert but some printers reject cartridges that it detects was filled with 3rd party ink
Or just buy a decent printer from a brand that lets you fill it with generic ink or toner
I’ve just been using laser printers exclusively for around a decade. Brother makes some black and white only (good enough for 99% of what I do) duplexing wifi/AirPrint models for around a hundred bucks which last forever and the 40 dollar toner pack lasts me a few years at a time.
The reason for the reset feature is because of 2020-2022.
Canon couldn't get enough chips due to the great chip shortage of 2020-2022 for their inktanks, so they were forced due to a manufacturing shortage to make it so that people could use non-genuine tanks to run their printers.
Personally I'm happy with my laser printer though, here in Australia, ink is expensive, and I only ever print in black and white. My Kyocera ECOSYS printer will do well over 7000 pages to a single toner, and the toner $40 for a non-genuine.
Can't thank you enough for exposing ink scams. The scam has been going on for a long time, and, sadly, there is no law to prevent it. Years ago, a friend who worked in the ink industry, producing products for Canon, Epson, and others, stated that the markup for consumer inks is 90%. It's not the printer that companies are cashing in, it’s the inks and worth more than gold. Again, no law has ever been placed to prevent these companies from overcharging consumers; lawmakers must have investments with them.
There's always more to the story. Even if you fill it back up, your "smart" printer would recognise that it's the same old cartridge being reused and would either print blurry or just crap. I know this cuz i have the canon's wireless inkjet which i bought last year. It worked a number of times before i started having this problem. But i figured out a way around it. It seems it recognises text somehow and tries to blur it but if you print a page as a photo it would print perfectly.
They way they limit pages printed varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and by model.
It can be really simple sometimes.
I had brother printer that simply had a cog that would turn a little every time a page got printed. Cog would block the moment it did full 360° turn which was 300 pages or whatever. So regardless if you printed bunch of pages full of text or just one small black dot per page it would scream its out of toner.
What we were doing was unscrew that cog, return it to 0° position and print another 200 or 300 pages out of same toner.
If you were able to unscrew that cog, why didn't you grind down the pin or the thing that prevented it from turning?
@@marekslemensky4531 i dont remember why, there was most likely some reason for it but its been over 10 years ago so...
Thank you for your service. You are educating all of us, and making us aware of scummy business tactics.
I would also like to express my gratitude, that you don't stop there, instead you check if it is possible to outsmart the scammer.
Great video, mad respect.
Thank you for pointing out this scam. This is like the Ticketmaster scam for ink.
canon's printer is this category is bit better. as stated on the video you can override the massages and refill yourself. its much cheaper, but costed you your time (and sanity) if you refill it manually. but HP's printer, thats belong to deepest hell imaginable. its truly cannot be bypassed.
@@KarrasBastomi I still have nightmares about HP printers. I can't believe they're legally allowed to sell those
It's cool to see photo / video channels actually making physical products / food / real estate investments so that they can use their photo/ video skills to promote and grow a business. The hot sauce business will teach so many lessons - cool to see it featured on the channel
We have to spread this video across the world and make sure these companies are forced out of business!
This happens when large corporations finance candidates for the presidency. Once in office, they own their loyalty to them.
We are living a fascist system. The far right is in bed with the government. But they try to make us belive that it is the left who is corrupting the government. So you look at the wrong direction.
Adding your own ink, works, I refilled canon ink cartridges about 20 years ago plus. I stopped doing it, 20 plus years ago because the foam inside the cartridges broke down and destroyed the print head. At a time when the bubble jet printers were £600 and the ink was almost £20 each and there were 4 of them... I changed to a small mono laser printer as a workhorse, using ink jet printers for occasional photo printing. If I want to print photographs now I use a wet print photo service. Basic cost about £1.00 per A3 size standard print. Everything else I now use a colour laser after retiring the mono printer after twenty plus years of good service.
Used to own a Canon multi-function printer. You’re not completely out of the woods by refilling the ink cartridges. The built-in printheads on these cartridges are only designed to last for the quantity of ink it has in the reservoir, give or take a few cycles. I’ve seen these fail after a few refills so you will still need to replace the whole cartridge every now and then. Still better than buying a new one every time the ink runs out, but just saying.
Same here, they are not the best - but who cares, its still quite a good deal, you just need to have a reserve one if you really care about quality of print when suddenly the old one will start failing. I wonder, whether they will die sooner when you print every day, or in the other case when you print just about so often that the head will dry every time
@@restoreleader yeah, I didn't bother going through the refill route on my then Canon. There were services being offered to convert it to continuous ink. But since the cartridges themselves didn't last as long, you would still need to purchase new ones every now and then and THEN transfer the continuous ink kit. Too cumbersome and messy so I just stuck with OEM ink cartridges. I must've gone through 6 or 7 black and color cartridges through the printer's life. Sold it after a few years and bought an Epson EcoTank in 2021. After 2 years, I'm on the 2nd black ink bottle but still on the first batch of colored inks. This was the first time I didn't stress or worry about ink usage and I'm glad I made the switch.
I actually like how Canon allows you to bypass the cartridges, so you can refill them and use them again. (I also know this trick for like 10 years so it's very good that it's still working)
While on the Epson, you can't refill them but I believe you can find refillable cartridges with a reset chip.
And on the Brother, just refill it and it will work including the ink level.
Fortunately, we are moving to the factory installed inktank system. So we don't have to face these crazy expensive ink cartridges again.
I bought cheaper refilled ink carts for my epson printer and the printer gave me an error. The cheap ink carts did have a chip too. I will buy from another online seller, maybe i can find some that my printer likes
Brother has been pushing firmware updates for their color laserjets that break third party cartridges
Careful with instantink too. I had fraud on my card and then forgot the account was linked to that card. They canceled my account and needed to print and was unable to use the printer until I updated the account with them. Also hp printer we bought doesn't print if you try to make copies on the scanner or feeder anymore to which they said I need a new printer because to repair it will cost more than what I paid. The whole thing is a scam. And paying 6.99 a month to print 100 pages ....I dunno....my husband and I are over it
@@sarahgarcia2850 Thank you for the info.
Subscription based printer?
Page counter instead of ink level?
Sound like scam.
And HP?
My dad said it was junk (I believe it's from 2006? and it broke at 2007 or 2008 or so, it was changed to Brother DCP-135c which you can refill the cartridges, but at that time the ink quality is junk. and it broke the print head like 3-4 years later)
I'd suggest you to buy a cheap bypassable printer, if the ink is low you refill it and bypass.
Only printer I would today buy is older Brother models. They're solid printers. Never ever any HP, Epson or Canon model.
This is absolutely insane. Can you do more videos on other printer brands. This is world changing.
Well done. In about 2017 I saw a clip by a guy who used to work at a call centre selling office supplies. He said that the printer cartridges for the colour cyan were well and truly overcharged (or, in Australian English, a rip-off).
Your clip extends that to the other cartridges as well.
Worth noting that the printer is actually printing micro dots on the page that was implemented to be used by authorities for identifying counterfeit bills. There's usually some stuff encoded all over the page. It's tiny dots but visible under a microscope.
This is just insane... we get scammed by every company in every possible way
We used to do event printing with Canon printers and their early Pixma line needed no cartridge chips, no countdown clocks, no catch foam pad sensors, nothing! It was why you wanted the Canon vs HP, Lexmark, Epson, or Kodak. After that we noticed the quality of new models hardly improved but the profitability of them must have skyrocketed once they adopted the "chip" strategy. We got smart and bought every one of those printers we could find.
If my memory serves me right I believe all printer engines are made by HP, the various add-ons and rip-offs are the individual companies very own.
2:30 about using CMY for black text.
Commercial/industrial printer here.
We have a saying that not all blacks are equal. See rich black (and its variations such as SWOP rich black, C60M50Y40K100 rich black (TAC250), and more) vs clean one-color black. One-color black is neutral but isnt deep black. So usually photos use rich black while elements like text use one-color black. But this surmises that you also use overprint vs knockout.
It really depends on the source and your RIP (how the file is translated to what inks an how much to use). Usually for text, its recommended to use one color black on overprint. But you'll need more advanced software to tell that to your printer.
What you talking about? The printer is less than $50. Do you really think the person buying it wants perfect blacks?
@@wonderingworld119 the world is filled with all kinds of buyers. Oddly enough, in my side of the world, cheap buyers expect more from their cheap purchases as if it should be able to do everything and excel at it. While buyers with deeper pockets usually understand more or less what they're getting.
Unfortunately, there are obviously more cheap buyers buying cheap printers versus buyers with more money buying cheap printers because they know they only need cheap prints.
Great video on the state of ink jet printers. Some people really don't want to mess with trying to refill cartridges themselves so that might not be an option. Also by reusing the previous cartridges the heads will eventually fatally clog. Not that big a deal since in the meantime you are saving so much money, but something to consider. For myself I will never buy an ink jet again. It's laser for me. Toner is dry so it never dries out so you have to throw out a half full cartridge. Heads don't clog since it uses a photoconductor and and fuser. It's just so much less fuss since the manufacturers are all concentrating on ink since that is the gold mine for them.
This reminds me of the HD signals being exploited by providers.
Back then, you only need either RGB cables or HDMI to get a high res on TV, signal bandwidths back then are already high to avoid bad pictures, just using the right cables and you're all set.
Then providers saw this and intentionally blocked or tuned down channels forcing you to use their "new boxes" which are basically calibrated not to render HD resolution if you aren't subscribed to their HD fees, or with Comcast/Xfinity they call it *"HD Technology Fee"* that's additional $9.90, don't believe that it's part of your "package", no it's not, it's an ADD-ON, if you got your package before it was implemented, you probably experienced No Signals on a lot of channels using HDMI or RGB cables, coz' the code wasn't added.
So, you call Tech Support, they add it and you complain to billing why your Bill goes up, and they tell you bunch of BULLSHITS like taxes and other fees.
They also tried *"DATA CAPPING!"* which was absolute EVIL!
We literally have no say against these diabolical companies!
Incredible. Thanks for this eye opening video! In my experience, HP printers are a SCAM. Even with brand new cartridges, they dried up after a month or 2. So I bought an EPSON EcoTank 2850 after a friends recommendation. I am SO HAPPY with it and have never looked back! 🙏 I’ve put up a quick video on my channel documenting the opening, setup, and test print.
Just bought an epson ecotank too. Best printer purchase of my life. Canons are the worst offenders.
Mine prompted the stop override about a month ago. I had to do it for each color before I could print anything only using black. I will try the refills for once. I don’t print often so I never bothered before. Thanks for the video!
Lee, this simply a pure quality information video - incredible practical value on what to do if you want to buy an ink printer but avoid this ink cartrige crazyness. I watched your previous video where you at first thought that the inktank would be a solution - I'm glad that continued to sophisticate your printing efficiency, I think similarly that's why I like it so much and was searching for exactly a video like this. This actually also removes the problem with inktank refill machines where the ink just has more place to get stuck and dry and problem with the inefficiency of the spilling actually a significant amount of ink in those sponges in the back of some of those printers where they tried to solve the drying issue with regular automatic flushes, etc.
Keep making these videos! We need to make this viral so something eventually gets done about it. It is criminal behaviour, and the reason I don't buy printers any more.
Everyone has known about this for years and nothing has been done
@@Henrix1998I wonder why and/or how 🤔
Crazy. Wouldnt have thought that. Now I do actually feel scammed
The Scam goes even further: They have a reservoir for cleaning the heads. But when it gets filled up eventually, the Printer will refuse to work and even if you´ll empty it out, you can´t reset it. And Canon is the worst offender there. And even the Inktanks will fail that way.
Don't know much about resetting a Canon printer with a full waste tank thing.. but in epson, there is a software for a specific or series of printers that can reset its counter and other factory diagnostics things. Also on brother printers, they have a key combinations and codes to do the same thing.
you can reset it by canon service software
Yeah, but where should the ink go?
@@svcross-do most in epson printers have some kind of access door at the back where you can remove the waste ink pad. But in brother and cannon printers, you need to disassemble the whole thing to remove the waste ink pad. Brother printers have a large waste ink pad that can survive a couple of resets before it starts to leak. I just reuse the InkPad, I flush it with water until all the waste ink is out , dry it then slap it back to the printer.
for tank printers, at least with epson, most modern versions have replacement reservoirs that are reasonably priced. The model I use, I know almost certainly uses a simple counter, because I read on that people have tried to replace the sponge.
Genuinely one of the best explanations of the entire situation that I’ve had. I always knew ink cartridges never properly indicated their levels but I didn’t know it was this bad
These printers are meant for occasional printing, if you need printer for regular printing then buying inktank printer is a simple solution but if you are little technical you can fill these cartridges, and why cartridges price is higher because companies sell these types of printer with subsidized(at loss) rates and recover its cost by selling cartridges at high cost because not everyone can refill it thats why you get these types of printer at very reasonable rates.
So the simple answer is if you are little technical then cartridges printer get your print done at barely nothing and if you are ordinary consumer then you should go for the inktank one.
Thank you for reading.
You have to set the output type to "Black & White" or the equivalent in the print/printer settings. Printing black in colour mode will still use colour. You didn't mention if you did this, but that **should** work. Great video!
The problem is that the print head is designed to break quickly - so refilling won't work forever, trust me. They knew that people would refill the cartridges with their own ink, that's why the heads were made to wear out quickly and start printing badly afer few refills (still better then buying new, but a laser printer is an unimaginably better option)
How many refills can a cartridge support? For me, the problem with laser printers is that they emit toxic stuff (nano plastic particles that can be lodged in your lungs). Printer companies and people say that cheap refilled cartridges would emit more of those toxic stuff. I can't verify if that is true or just the printer companies trying to scare us, but since it's something related to health, I don't want to risk it. Of course, an original cartridge for a laser printer is almost as expensive as the printer itself.
@@typingcat this is the first time I've heard of this regarding health risks from laser printers - I'll have to do some research, as I work in a room with an active large laser printer. The new cartridge for that printer is quite expensive, about two to three times more expensive than an ordinary inkjet cartridge for a plotter and printer, but you can print thousands of pages with one cartridge - we literally forget when it was replaced, and it is used and printed all the time.
@@typingcat I just refilled mine for 2 years without issue (HP). But, I let it run out and had to buy another cartridge. I couldn't find a hack to reset it...
This is why I switched to laser printers 15 years ago. Laser toner cartridges can also be refilled at home.
Wha? Really? I have to check that out ASAP. Toner cartridges last much longer but also cost $$.
Yeah, i think my family got our first color laser printer like 20 years ago. I don't remember how exactly how long, but I think it was only after like 2 years of normal use, that we needed to change the cartridge, and still the cartridge was quite cheap and to change it was like 10sec. To this day I do not understand why people buy ink printers for home use, and for that matter even offices. If your largest paper you print is A3, then you 100% don't need ink printers, and on that special occasion when you need to print something colorful and of superior quality, you should go to a printing workshop and pay those few $ and get a quality print on a quality paper.
A class action lawyer must see this video. There MUST be a class action lawsuit here. PLEASE 🙏
VERY thorough! How do you plug up the hole once you refill the cartridge ?
Working in the inkjet business for more than 16 years, you should know there is a GOLDEN rule: if you want to have PURE black color in your print, when making (or using pre-made) color profiles you always need to use combine CMY to create a good "neutral" black. In particular with "low cost" inks... printing only one pure color, commonly results in printing- & color anomalies where the black appears to be blueish when using a photospectrometer. Or even in the worst case, cause some kind of banding while fast printing.
But in the end, the ink business itself is a SCAM, that is true. Knowing that producing inks per liter, only costs a few tens of dollars per liter...
And about inkjet-printers, something else you should know is that a LOT of ink is wasted during the cleaning cycle. Many of these printers contain a little pump sucking inks through the nozzles of the head into... waste. But there also a secondary purpose for these cleaning cycles: to "shape" the "meniscus" which is required for a clean droplet formation.
So while it wastes ink, it also insures print quality then? If only the cartridges weren't being scalped on, that cleaning cycle thing probably wouldn't be discussed at all...
These hacks don't usually last long. Once the printer companies realize that you've been cheating on them, they'll release new versions to plug the vulnerability. Also, they can kill the reset feature with an update.
1:26 How do you weigh volume ?
When refiling yourself, I recommend using Black 8ml only and color 5ml only. Why do I advise less than most of the videos around? Because the sponges inside get diluted over time, refilling with a little less makes them last longer.
The only issue I noticed after refilling these cartridges many times is that the head clogs/wears out and no amount of cleaning gives you a clear prints. I am talking about 20+ refills. Does not bother me too much for casual office work because I can always use a service for professional copies.
I stopped after 1:42, because there is an American clearly not understanding not only the metric system, but the difference between WEIGHT and VOLUME. Yes, we Europeans are smart enough to make water have a density so 1ml of water at standard conditions equals 1 g of water, but printer ink is MUCH DENSER! You cannot WEIGHT milliliters of something else than water. You have to WEIGHT THE WEIGHT, or MEASURE THE VOLUME!
Yes, nitpicking this is correct. Yet even with this approximation, that doesn't change the point, if ink is denser than water, that would mean for the same weight it's even less volume of ink than shown here with water.
Obviously not acceptable if that would be for data collection / comparison or various benchmarks, but for just having a rough idea of how much ink it contains...
This is absolutely disgusting that they do this.
I didn’t even know about the cleaning stage it does when you switch it off and on.
Thanks for telling us about the reset.
Deffo looking to get one of those ink tank printers when our current printer dies.
Great video buddy.
Just make sure you'll print something once every week at the very least!
That printer does. I worked for HP and HP machines do not do that. The reason why we tell people to never unplug or turn off their ink printers is because every few days the machine will drop a tiny bit of ink to keep the head fresh. This can also be avoid by printing a test page every 3 weeks.
Another thing is why printers used a little bit of color, in that model that he had you can take off the color and make the machine exclusively black only.
The tank ink printers SOUND nice but you have to understand what 5% coverage means so you can do the math. Because of that reason I only use instant ink with dual cartridges, it is the cheapest option.
That stop button feature is probably a developer mode so they can test the printer without costing themselves that much money.
But yeah drilling a hole, refilling yourself and taping over the hole seems like an amazing fix.
The stop button feature has been around for years on Canon printers that use cartridges with a print head on them as opposed to the ink tank type, when a cartridge is close to running out (according to indicated ink levels) you get a message on your computer screen actually telling you to hold the stop/cancel button down for 5 seconds to continue printing, granted it's quite a long message but within it it tells you what to do.
I think they assume 5%-page coverage when they list page yields.
I repair all manner of electrical items and IJ printers are no exception. I recently replaced a faulty printhead in a HP all in one, these printers have vacuum pumps inside them that make a numming sound when about to print a document, that sound is costing you a fortune as it is sucking expensive ink out of the cartridges and dumping it via thin rubber tubes onto a blotting pad inside the printer.
You have two more problems with your advice. Ink reservoirs have a finite amount of ink they can store. Some printers keep track of this and disable printing abilities once the reservoir is full. Some eco-tank printers have replaceable reservoirs because of this, but most are non serviceable. Second and most important is that ink cartridges are designed in such a way that inducing an air vent at the top (drilling a hole) will cause the ink to flow differently through the cartridge and possibly cause the head to gradually leak ink. Kind of like drilling a hole on the bottom of a milk carton and not much milk comes out until you drill a vent at the top and it all comes spilling out the bottom. I used to get excited about refilling cartridges, but after many battles with many printers I now refuse to ever buy an inkjet again! I'll just let the local drugstore make prints for me for a few cents each as I often get promotional emails to get 40% to 70% off photo prints (almost all major drugstore chains offer this to get you in the store).
What if you stick tape over drilled hole?
THATS WHY YOU USE A SYRINGE AND THE SAME HOLE THEY USED TO FILL THE INK CARTAGE UNDER THE LABEL. THEN YOU JUST STICK THE LABEL BACK DOWN AGAIN.
Does the "stop button trick" also clear the counter that makes a printer unusable after printing x-thousand sheets? Manufacturers say that's because the sponge that swallows the ink gets full and it might spill ink. So the printer will be disabled.
Why not a thermalprinter or laser for the labels?
I love that you bring the ink-scam up into light.
As a sales and technician of inkjet printers, I always inform the customer the difference between CIS (continuous ink system) and cartridge type printer.
If you use the printer casually, the cartridge type is for you.
Because the cartridge type printer is not easy to dry the ink of because it's sealed inside the cartridge.
And the continuous ink system is designed for massive printout and cheaper refillable inks.
And because it is called CIS, you need to use it often.
If not used for a long time, the ink may dry out or backflow back to the ink tank that may cause a not good quality printout and may damage the printer head.
Btw, using fake ink or different models of ink may also damage your printerhead, because printerhead has a designated ink or compatible ink for it.
Using fakes may have clogged the nozzle of the printerhead.
And may cost you more for replacement.
And that's the good side of using cartridge type printers, specially canon and hp because its printerhead is also the cartridge.
If the printout gets disfigured, all you need to do is replace the cartridge that's also the printerhead of HP and canon printers.
The only badside is low amount of printout and higher price of ink cartridges.
What's all I know about the inkjet printer.
Choose wisely that suits your needs.
(Please understand, not mock my english. I'm not good at this, thanks to auto correct and grammar correct of my android gboard. 😂)
After years struggling with ink jet printers (don't print for a while? ha, gata clean the heads), so years ago my dad got a color laser printer (I can't recall the brand), and it seemed to go through the color toner quite quickly, even though we only really printed black, which was odd. When you held a page up to a bright light, at an angle, sure enough, there was a very light yellow dusting over the entire page. It was depositing a little bit of color on every page. Switched to brother laser B&W, and now my dad, I, his wife, have a combined like, 5 or 6, and we couldn't be happier. Can find them 2nd hand for like, $50-100, and after a few years, we buy a toner cartridge, everyone wins. After using them, I would never switch back to ink jet, even if ink wasn't a scam.
I buy my printers based on ink prices, not printer prices. I rather spend $500 on a printer if I get 5000 pages for $100 worth of cartridges vs 100 pages for $50 work of cartridges. But I'm a fairly heavy printer user so I can make use of this
Yes, you CAN see a difference between pure black text and text printed with color too. Its small but the text is generally perceived as smoother. Its small, the difference is there, but we should have the option to turn off that setting.
Printers don't 'count' pages, but they do count drops of ink to estimate ink levels.
I personally use and sell Epson EcoTank printers in my shop, and the cost per page is essentially zero with a set of 4 colors being about $45 total and each color having 70ml.
Canon and HP have similar printers but they use a thermal print-head so wear out extremely quickly compared to Epson's piezo nozzles which literally last 6-7 years. You can easily get replacement waste ink tanks for epson too, but not canon or hp.
120 bucks for a bottle of hotsauce is the real scam here, wtf?!
That trick is for select few Canons printer only. I tried it like 10 years ago on mine and it wouldn't work. Then I bought an Eco tank from Epson, there early version. It was last one on sale for $200. Best money spent, bought the big bottles and I am still going with them. It has been at least 7 years now. Now I print off my own note paper, planner, weekly planner, and even books, like instruction manuals for electronics and stuff. I just need to remember to clean it a little more often but I love this thing. Once you get an eco tank like this, it really frees you up.
In my experience, the cheaper the printer, the dearer the ink and not just at checkout, but over all use. I now have a Epson wf7840 A3+ (bought for the A3+, 13inches² & 4 cartridges black, blue, magenta & yellow all separate) and 2 years later so far so good.
Last time I bought InkJet printer was....it was Epson InkJet Stylus Photo 700...that experience alone prevented me to ever even think about ink-jet tech.
I’m a commercial printer with essentially a scaled up versions of inkjet printers (prints sheets or rolls 10’ wide). There truly are some bases for the seemingly absurd aspects (such as using cmy mixed with black), but it’s often just a suboptimal settings configuration chosen for the job at hand.
This made me miss my old dot matrix printer I gave away over decade ago when I was moving. It was noisy as hell, the resolution was so bad that you couldn't use smallest fonts, but I got it free as used, and it never run out of ink in my use (couple of pages like once at few months for over decade).
I see your dot matrix and raise you a daisy wheel ....
Just needed to comment on one thing: When you printed the black text with color under it, did you have the driver set for color or black&white printing? Most printers will put some color nick under black when printing in color mode, generally as an attempt to either get a more solid black area or to make the black color look a little more neutral (a lot of black inks and toner have just a bit of a shift toward red or blue if you compare them to a totally neutral black and the color ink can be used to correct for this). Usually, if you print in black&while mode the printer will use only the black ink and no color ink.
Going a bit deeper, if you look in the driver there are also likely settings in the color tab that will allow you to control the use of the color ink when printing black even in the color mode. It’s generally called something like “use black ink only”. You can turn this on to save on using color inks for printing black when printing in color mode, possibly at a slight loss in image quality where black appears in the middle of something like a color image.
But the best thing to do is always make sure the driver is set to black&white mode (sometimes revered to as monochrome mode or gray scale mode) when you just want to print black and white pages.
Of course the actual amount of usable ink in a cartridge seems absolutely ridiculous. It like selling you a 20 ounce soft drink, but rigging the bottle so you can only get 2 or 3 ounces out of the bottle, but still claiming it’s a 20 ounce bottle.
Btw, if you look at the standards the printer industry uses, you’ll find that the standard test page used for measuring how many pages an ink or toner cartridge can print is a page of something like H’s that only cover something like 5% of the page with ink, so an image that covers the whole page is the equivalent of about 20 of these “standard” pages. And that’s for black & white. It’s worse for color, since in images you probably have an average of at least two colors everywhere, so that’s like the equivalent of 40 of the “standard” pages. This 5% measurement isn’t exactly any type of a secret. The testing procedures are available online as a standard. But you’ll find manufacturers mention it in tiny print at the end of the specs, if at all!
Hope this is useful to someone.
Thanks for sharing this info, I have tried to fill my HP ink-jet printer cartridge numerous times but found that the new printers have this function where it records the level of ink when you install new cartridge, so even if I fill the ink in an empty cartridge, the status of the cartridge shows the same that it is empty and needs to be replaced, it was really annoying and costly at the same time because the printer was not able to print, even 10 pages perfectly full of ink . 6 months back i bought a HP ink tank 585 printer ,and ever since I have not refilled even a single drop of ink of my printer, I have printed a lot of coloured pages ranging from glossy papers to a 4 size papers and every time I print in colour ,so it is my suggestion to all the people out there to better go for ink-tank printers without any hesitation as it will be cheaper for you in the long run.
I bought a black and white laser printer years ago (for $125) and it has never run out of ink. Inkjets are a total scam. Great video, thanks!
I had my laser printer run out of toner after what must have been thousands of pages but I got it refilled for like 15 bucks at some unofficial place