"Arfa Daily" wrote in
:



"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



I bought a refill kit at CompUSA once,a long time ago,and the black ink
faded to brown even when the document was stored away in a file box,out of
the light.eventually,the doc became unreadable.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com