I’ve had a Dell All In One 948 Printer for about a month now. I primarily got it to use as a scanner and only occasionally to print. However I noticed the other day that it’s stating my ink cartridges (Dell Series 11) are only 33% full. I have literally only printed four pages of text on draft quality since I got this printer and cannot believe that it used 2/3 of the ink doing that. I think that it’s misrepresenting the ink levels and since I’ve read that this particular model printer will not let you print once the ink reaches a certain level, I’m wondering if there is anyway to fool the ink management utility? I’ve read of this being done with other makes/models of printer which would then print 200+ pages on a supposedly “empty” ink cartridge.
New cartridges (which can only be purchased from Dell) are around $60, but I can’t imagine paying $60 every month just so I can print a couple items each month. Basically we’re talking about $720 a year to print 100 pages or less, and I’d like to avoid that if I can.
To my understanding some printers periodical run cleaning programs and they use ink to do this, they run it through the system to unblock printer heads and the like. This could be what’s happened to yours. I’m sorry I have idea how you fool the ink levels of a Dell.
Edit
I have found this site that does your model compatible cartridges for about $12 also ink refill kits for you to fill your own starting at about $4.
http://www.google.com/products?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLG_en___GB291&q=Dell+all+in+one+948+ink+cartridges+USA&um=1&sa=X&oi=product_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title
2nd Edit
I tried to find info on the automatic seetings that printers have to periodical run a print head clean but all I could find was the link below. This confirms that ink is used to clean the heads but it is refering to manully do this, but printers are set to also automaically do this periodical so you need to find the cleaning settings on your and resset it so that it only cleans when you command it to or you will be forever be buying ink. Mine does two clean programmes and one is deeper and warns before starting that it will use a lot more ink than he standard. I would stake my money on the mystery ofthe dissapearing ink levels being down to an automatic cleaning cycling not a faulty ink level reader.
http://files.support.epson.com/htmldocs/pho22_/pho22_rf/maint_2.htm
Comment by Paddington — July 24, 2010 @ 4:05 am