Pixma and low ink warnings?

[franco]

I have a Pixma ip4000, and I got the low ink warnings when it looked like there was still plenty of ink in the spongy part of the ink cartridge. I kept using the printer, but then got another warning telling me that one of the cartridges was empty and if I kept printing the printer could be damaged.

The thing is it couldn't have been empty as my DVDs were still printing. Should I heed these warnings or can I assume that if it is still outputting ink then it is OK to print with?

[ozymango]

Well, I've got a Pixma ip6000d (which I absolutely love) and when it gets to the "low ink level" alert, I've usually still got a couple dozen photos worth of ink in whatever cartridge that's going out on me. So I run them down until they say "out of ink."

As for how long you can run in the "out of ink" mode ... yeah, there's still ink in the spongy part of the cartridge, and I've gone a few pix past that, but it's possible to clog a print head if you were to actually run completely out of ink. Or you could clog that nozzle of whatever cartridge finally runs dry -- I'm not sure of the physics behind all this but I've had it happen on a couple of (cheap) inkjet printers (various manufacture) at work (I do tech support at a college), you run the cartridge bone-dry and then the darn printer refuses to behave after that.

Doesn't always happen, and I'm not certain it's a deadly risk, maybe just soaking the print head would clean it out, but seems to me the risk ain't really worth the chance. That is, I'll run the ink down all the way till it says it's completely out, but that's it, the most I'd get is probably just a few more pages.

If you're like me and wanna run as long as possible because ink's so bloody pricey for these beasts, I'd recommend buying generic ink for your printer. I dunno what shipping is to the UK from the States, but here there are several companies (supermediastore, for one) who stock "generic" cartridges for your model, and I've used G&G brand refills for all my Canon printers (I've also got an i850 that just keeps going and going and going). It's maybe a third of the cost of Canon ink, and the quality (of my prints) is very, very good, pretty much indistinguishable from the Canon brand. It may not last 100 years, but I don't sweat it, it's never clogged my printers yet!

[franco]

Thanks for the long reply, Ozymango. I use inks from ebay, and one good point to mention is that those cartridges can dry out if I do not use them for long enough, so I suppose that could clog the print heads as well. I used deep cleaning to unclog my yellow cartridge just yesterday, and that seems to work OK.

I think I'll just run them down until I start getting bad quality prints. I'll check out the generic ink. There are ebay sellers from the states doing good prices for reconditioned cartridges, but they are no cheaper than buying from the UK.

Edited on 17 March 2007 to say, I got another 30 discs with those ink cartridges. I had to use cleaning at times to get the ink to come out. I am having some problems with one of my new cartridges leaking but I think that is down to buying off ebay.