Barry Shultz

Ink Level Monitors Exposed

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

Most printers count ink drops. Every line of print is produced by tinydroplets 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 printersto 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 canstill trick the printer into printing more from an "empty" ink tank. Just tell thesoftware that you have installed a new cartridge and you can get morepages 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 init. It's just a guide.

It goes both ways too. Sometimes your levels will be good but your inkcartridge runs out of ink. It could be that the cartridge was not filledproperly 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 tokeep track of 12,000,000 drops of ink per second all day long!

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