Out of ink? Already? When Farhad Manjoo's Brother printer abruptly stopped zipping out prints, he began to wonder if the printer wasn't simply lying that it was out of toner in order to trick him into buying more before he needed it. The prints hadn't been fading at all, but the printer simply refused to go on without a new cartridge.
No fool, Manjoo turned to the web for a solution: He saved his 60 bucks and instead found a simple fix. By covering up a sensor on the side of the toner cartridge with a piece of electrical tape he tricked the printer into thinking the cartridge was full. Well, not so much trick as convince: Manjoo says his printer's been going strong ever since, eight months and hundred of pages down the road, pumping out perfect pages.
Printers of both the laser and inkjet variety are notorious not just for requiring expensive replacement cartridges but for trying to get you to replace them well before you need to. It's epidemic in the industry, to the point where class action lawsuits have filed against Epson and Hewlett-Packard over the trickery.
In his story for Slate, Manjoo helpfully digests most of the conventional and unconventional wisdom for getting extra life out of a toner or inkjet cartridge, from vigorously shaking your laser toner to de-clump it to digging into the menus to find options for overriding "cartridge check" features. Because there are so many printer models out there, Manjoo ultimately recommends a web search for specific advice, but FixYourOwnPrinter is a good place to start.
Saving a tree may be good, but saving a whole bunch of oil and keeping a cartridge full of chemicals out of the landfill: Even better.
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