"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
...

klem kedidelhopper wrote:

I recently was given an HP J3640 Officejet printer. This printer had
apparently sat around for a few years and both the color and black
cartridges had dried up. Without knowing if the printer had any other
problems I wasn't going to spend money on new cartridges. So after
multiple soakings in very warm water I finally got the color one to
print but only in red and yellow. There was no cyan, and the black
still would not print.

I discovered that HP cartridges have small fill holes under their
labels which makes it a snap to access the sponges inside with a
hypo. I obtained some generic cyan and black ink from my son, and used
a syringe to fill both cartridges. Then I "boiled" them both some
more. Eventually they both came alive and although the contrast on
color isn't perfect it's certainly pretty good. The black looks fine
now too. After running the clean cycle a few times and aligning the
cartridges I'm quite pleased with how things turned out. Now I'm
thinking of getting some yellow and red from him and topping off those
colors as well.

The only issue now is that on power up I get a message that both
cartridges are low on ink. If I acknowledge the message by pressing
"OK" it goes away and everything is good and the printer works fine.
Now I can accept the fact that the yellow and red may be low as I
didn't touch them but I know that I definitely filled the black right
up so it can't be low.

I've been told that there is a "chip" in these cartridges that tells
the printer when the cartridge is low and that this chip somehow needs
to be reset. Or can I just acknowledge the message each time, make it
go away, and resume normal operation? Does this "chip" count pages or
does it actually measure the ink levels?

I certainly don't mind doing the reset each time on power up or
whenever, so I guess what I'm asking is is this message just simply a
reminder, generated by a chip that "thinks" its cartridge is low? And
would it be OK to just simply acknowledge it each time, thereby making
it go away, or if left to its own devices will it eventually cause
other problems or cause the printer to shut down completely? Thanks,
Lenny


Which HP cartridges? I haven't seen any that were 'chipped', and have
refilled a lot of different types. One thing to keep in mind is that
the printhead is in the HP cartridge, and running them dry can destroy
them. I think there is a serail number, but the printer only tracks a
couple sets before they are removed from memory. Epson was really big
on storing the information on an EEROM inside the cartridge and cheap
'Cartridge Chip Reseter' were for sale all over the place a couple
years ago and are still on Ebay.


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense

My Photosmart C5180 uses 363 cartridges, and they are chipped. As far as I
know, they do not measure ink directly. It's a case of them estimating when
they should be empty, based on what the printer knows it has done since the
cartridge was replaced. This is why the low ink message always says
"estimated ink levels", and why you can usually carry on printing for at
least a year (well, a bit longer, anyway ...) before the cartridge *really*
runs out.

As it happens, I recently got fed up of shelling out about six quid or so
($9) for each of the five colour cartridges, and twice that for a high
capacity black. They are not even an HP type that has the print head built
in. I've always been a bit wary of 'generic' inks, but based on the fact
that the price to re-ink it with 'genuines' was getting silly, I cast around
the 'net to see what I could find. I came up with a company here in the UK
that was selling not one but two complete sets of six high capacity
cartridges, for the grand total of 8 quid ($12) post free !!

I ordered a couple of sets, and they arrived in less than 24 hours. Yes,
they are Chinese, but they are all individually sealed in their own bags,
and the printer accepts them without squawking that they are not 'real', and
correctly reads them as high capacity types. So far, I have not had the
slightest problem with them, and nor have a number of friends that I have
recommended them to. One is a pro photographer. He is currently trying a set
in a spare printer that he has. He showed me a print that had been done with
them, and the same print done with genuine HP Vivera photo inks. You could
not tell the difference in terms of colour rendition. He is now leaving some
prints out in daylight, to see how stable these Chinese inks are, as he
reckons that a few years back, he bought some refilled cartridges from one
of these high street shops that you see selling them, and that the pictures
just faded away over a period of about 3 months.

Arfa