I've been obsessed readers and their solutions to the high cost of inkjet printer cartridges. You can read my previous posts by scrolling up the page. In today's installment, I have a few of your low-tech solutions for printing problems suggested by readers.
"If print quality deteriorates and you're pretty sure there's still ink left in the cartridge, but the ink nozzles are clogged or dried up, remove the cartridge and immerse it in plain water for a few hours. Blot it as dry as you can, very gently; allow it to air-dry overnight; and put it back in the printer." --Judy S.
With some trepidation I tried this with my old Lexmark Z43 inkjet. It worked. No guarantees on other cartridge brands, but if you can't get it to work otherwise, you might as well give this a try.
"There's a little free utility I use on my Epson printer called SSC Service Utility that can tell you how much ink is left in your cartridges. I always replace any cartridge that shows 3 percent left.
"One thing I do to avoid [cartridge] clogging is to frequently print a nozzle check to keep the ink wet in all the nozzles. It doesn't use much ink, and since I reckon that one cleaning operation uses about 6% of your ink, it's cheap insurance.
"The 'nozzle check' is a small printout of output from all the nozzles, and uses very little ink, probably comparable to a Word document with a few lines of text. The 'head cleaning cycle' is different, and is a long process whereby the printer tries to clean clogs internally. This is done only when a 'nozzle check' determines that one or more of the nozzles is clogged." --Billy R., Columbia, South Carolina
Wes A. from Wilsonville, Oregon, was using an Epson CX 3200 MFP when one day he tried printing and up popped a message saying that his new ink cartridges were not an Epson brand, so the printer would not function. It turns out that when he'd gone to Epson's site to download the latest drivers a while back, he'd also downloaded and installed a small utility called the Status Monitor. That was the culprit. Once he uninstalled Status Monitor, he could use any ink cartridge.
More tomorrow.
