Ink Level Monitors Exposed

Author: Barry Shultz

When you print a page on your inkjet printer, if you have your drivers properly installed, you will see a small screen pop up telling you how full your cartridges are. How does your printer know this?

Most printers count ink drops. Every line of print is produced by tiny droplets of ink and your very smart printer keeps track of every one of them. It's pretty impressive because it's nothing for todays inkjet printers to lay down 12,000,000 drops per second.

Canon also uses an optical method. The ink sensor monitors the ink levels through optical detection and dot counting and alerts users when the supply of any color ink is low.

Canon's ink level system is probably the most accurate although you can still trick the printer into printing more from an "empty" ink tank. Just tell the software that you have installed a new cartridge and you can get more pages out of it.

You can reset the Epson cartridges after they run out and get a whole lot more pages out of them. Of course you need an Epson universal resetter to do that.

Things can happen to throw off this counter and you may get erroneous readings from your ink level indicator, so don't put a whole lot of trust in it. It's just a guide.

It goes both ways too. Sometimes your levels will be good but your ink cartridge runs out of ink. It could be that the cartridge was not filled properly at the factory but it most likely is caused by faulty ink level data.

The data can get corrupt by things like power loss from lightning storms, a virus, hard drive crashes, Spyware, corrupt printer drivers etc, etc.

So when you think you have a tough job just be glad you don't have to keep track of 12,000,000 drops of ink per second all day long!

About the author: Barry Shultz is the author of Atlascopy News, and President of Atlascopy, Inc. Atlascopy specialized in affordable alternatives to the high cost of printer supplies. Sign up for the Atlascopy Newsletter and get 10% coupons every week in your email. http://atlascopy.com/signup_new.htm Go to Atlascopy to save a bundle on your printer and refilling supplies. http://atlascopy.com