Canon cartridges

[Fat Tone]

My MP600 has been nagging me for ages about the cyan getting low. Finally the printer itself refused to do any more printing until it was changed. There had been no loss in print quality whatsover.

So today I gave in and changed the cartridge. Here's a pic of the old and new. Surely that must still have some life in it? Its a CLI-8 series

Has anyone tried the chipped compatibles yet? I can get them for less than half the price of originals, but I wonder about their quality.

[cjolley]

http://www.slate.com/id/2198316/

Take That, Stupid Printer!How to fight back against the lying, infuriating, evil ink-and-toner cabal.

By Farhad Manjoo
Posted Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008, at 3:21 PM ET The Brother HL-2040 printer
I bought a cheap laser printer a couple years ago, and for a while, it worked perfectly. The printer, a Brother HL-2040, was fast, quiet, and produced sheet after sheet of top-quality prints—until one day last year, when it suddenly stopped working. I consulted the user manual and discovered that the printer thought its toner cartridge was empty. It refused to print a thing until I replaced the cartridge. But I'm a toner miser: For as long as I've been using laser printers, it's been my policy to switch to a new cartridge at the last possible moment, when my printouts get as faint as archival copies of the Declaration of Independence. But my printer's pages hadn't been fading at all. Did it really need new toner—or was my printer lying to me?

...

Some Canon models seem to respond well to shutting the printer off for a while; apparently, this resets the system's status indicator.

...

FixYourOwnPrinter.com posted by a fellow calling himself OppressedPrinterUser.

[UtwigMU]

The used Laserjet 5 I bought 2 years ago for 50 Euros with a spare toner is at almost half million copies now, still going strong. It even came with 10Mb network card, so no need for parallel port.

[Dr Mordrid]

Bought an HP LaserJet recently for $10 at an estate sale. Cleaned it up, put in a new cartridge and off it went. It''s sitting right next to my $15 HP OfficeJet K80xi multifunction/fax, which came ready for bear with full and extra cartridges. Even found a double-sided printing attachment for the wifes HP 9800 13x19 tabloid printer for $30.

You wouldn't believe the stuff you can get at estate sales; 16" Schmitt telescopes ($300), computer gear and $$ software up the wazoo (AutoCAD lost their case vs. licensing 'gartage sale' software) etc. etc.

Well worth trying....