Printer Eats Ink I'm Not Paying For

amother

Sun, Dec 14 2014, 10:03 am

I am having a dilemma. I work from home and my office pays for my paper and ink. I had to pay for the machine. I decided on a laser printer b/c I print a lot. The ink is expensive, but I was expecting that the machine would work fast (saving $ that work would pay for my time) and cost less per page. But, in reality, I am going through ink so fast. First I am going to check if there is something defective about the ink or if I really printed so much, but assuming there aren't technical problems WWYD? I am a very honest person and don't want to steal, but am not really interested in laying out more money and time for a machine when I already have one!

youngishbear

Sun, Dec 14 2014, 10:37 am

If you're using the ink only for work, and no one has complained that the amount is outrageous, why do you assume that it is? Can you ask around, people who do more or less what you do?

Most businesses have expense accounts for office supplies. And ink is expensive.

amother

Sun, Dec 14 2014, 10:56 am

Thanks.
I haven't billed them for it yet. They know that ink is expensive. I am just afraid that this ink is too expensive. Also, it only lasted me around 3 weeks and I payed almost $100.00 (well, the shekel equivalent). I am only using the printer for work.

seeker

Sun, Dec 14 2014, 11:22 am

Try troubleshooting first. Maybe the printer is telling you the toner is low when it really isn't because its detector or page counter is off, this can often be reset. Or if this is your first time using it (not clear from the story) maybe the toner it came with was a smaller starter pack and the ones you buy will last longer. Also, did you buy the toner from the manufacturer or from a third party that may or may not be honest?

Rubber Ducky

Sun, Dec 14 2014, 11:49 am

• If some of the printing is in color but you only need black and white, set the printer to print in grayscale. Black toner is cheaper.

• Buy the largest size toner cartridges, the cost will be lower per page.

• Wait until the printer is completely out of toner or pages start to look faded. You can still print a lot of pages with a "low toner" warning.

amother

Sun, Dec 14 2014, 3:14 pm

seeker wrote:

I bought the ink from the same store as the printer. No, I finished the starter. This was a new cartridge that I bought. Good idea about the troubleshooting. I plan to do just that.

amother

Sun, Dec 14 2014, 3:16 pm

Rubber Ducky wrote:

I buy whatever they have which they say they have to "special order" for me. I should've been more careful when I bought the machine. I just bought the cheapest laser I could find. I am overall happy w/ the machine. It's black/white so the color is not an issue. It says low toner and then before the pages even look faded, it says "cartridge empty" and refuses to print.

seeker

Sun, Dec 14 2014, 3:20 pm

If it refuses to print it is very possibly on a page counter that automatically stops when it's "supposed" to be finished. There are usually ways to reset the count and bypass that. You didn't mention how many pages you print, or how dense they are.

amother

Sun, Dec 14 2014, 3:34 pm

seeker wrote:

''

I print a lot, like 300 to 400 pages a week. I don't know what a dense pg. is but the documents are often very different stylewise. How do I reset the page counter?

seeker

Sun, Dec 14 2014, 3:58 pm

Page count settings will depend on your printer. I just remember when I was researching which printer to buy and I googled the name of one I was considering, it turned up a bunch of pages saying that you need to do some shtick to reset it otherwise it will refuse to print - Nothing major, just like open this and press that at the same time while holding a frog upside down and whistling yankee doodle. The kind of thing you wouldn't know except someone figured it out.

By density I just meant that you'll go through toner much faster if you're printing full-page graphics or black backgrounds as opposed to a few lines of black print on white page, or shipping labels. But if your printer has an internal page counter, it will consider your one-line pages as part of the total and say it's out of ink way before it really is.