Printer ink/toner is is the biggest racket out there. On another note, when you're making a video keep your cellphone away from from the mic and speakers...

*timeshift

Adding video to channels (Timeshift) - requested by BoneRemake.

Good find, considering I have this same exact printer and my toner just ran out!

"Don't buy a Macaw, their loud..."

WORD!

I won't deny that printer ink is a racket - it certainly is. I mean, it's more expensive than oil which we have to find, drill thousands of feet through bedrock to obtain, ship halfway across the world to refineries in some of the largest vessels ever constructed and then disseminate to nearly every town in the world.

However, most printers also use ink to cartridges as a substitute radiator. This means that actually using up all the ink can then damage your printer once levels drop too low. So, they don't let the ink level get below something like 30% because then it loses heat absorption functionality. Of course, it would actually be cheaper to install a regular heat sink or cheap fan in a printer, but they intentionally don't do that because you keep having to come back to buy ink if they can force you to throw it away sooner.

Neat trick. It seems the printer uses some kind of optical sensor to check the toner level.
Too bad most printers use an electronic chip in the cartridge that counts how much you've printed and just stop working after x number of pages or x mg of toner/ink, obviously the printer refuses to print anything if you just tape over the connectors on those.

The best advice for anyone looking for a new printer: find an old printer with replaceable print heads (for ink) or drum (laser). Printer technology hasn't advanced much in the last 10-15 years. Just make sure there are drivers available for it.

@Morganth: It's not that the printers have inadequate cooling and need the ink for cooling. Most inkjet printers work by heating tiny ink-filled tubes (there's usually over 100 in the print head), instantly vaporizing the ink, forming a bubble that shoots a tiny drop of ink out of the tube and then pulls more ink into the tube from the other side. If there's no ink to vaporize the tube could overheat or more probably whatever ink is left dries up and clogs up the print head. If you put a heatsink on the heating elements the printer just wouldn't work.

There's a software product called "Inksaver 2.0", which allows you to control ink output quality with a slider. They're presently retooling to make a new version later this year.

Also, there's ecofont, which puts tiny holes in the text letters. There's a free font download at their site, too.

Great hair, knows a lot about printers, AND owns a macaw... You're in luck ladies. He's single!

Perhaps he can use the money he saves on toner to buy an office desk/chair so he doesn't have to sit on the floor!

A ream is 500 pages. He didn't get reams of printouts on a spent toner cartridge.

It's like when I pin modded an AthlonXP cpu to change the multiplier, back in the day. A lot of products are arbitrarily crippled in ways that waste time/materials to extract a higher economic rent.

This whole thing works for those printers with electronic chips too. There often is a way to reset the little memory on the chip, so all the ink will be used.

@jwray I did this with an old 2000+ and tweaked it to 2400+ level with aircooling. You could unlock the multiplier with a mere lead pencil to connect ...ehh the thing^^ Nowadays all the AMD Cpus are unlocked as it seems. But who could cool these things overclocked anyways...

Never buy Brother printers. Had an all-in-one once. Every time it went to print, it would do a "print head clean". Also, every 2-3 hours, it would perform a "print head clean". All according to plan in the instructions. No errors/warranty issues.

For those of you who don't speak Printer Ripoff, "print head clean" means "piss ink into the 1 pint container at the bottom of the printer".

We had to change ink once every 14 days. Brother told us to turn it off between print runs. As it was also our fax machine... that really wasn't an option. It's holding down some important paperwork in the garage now.

I learned to never buy a macaw.

Pray it's not discovered macaw blood makes an excellent replacement toner.

...they're loud...

TWO WORDS!! (contracted)

>> ^youdiejoe:

"Don't buy a Macaw, their loud..."
WORD!

I would just like to add that this little trick saved my ass today at work. Thanks @marinara for posting and thanks @dag for videosift!