My printing rant and advice

I have an HP officejet inkjet 6500, for about 4 years, and it gets used quite a bit. I have always used HP cartridges. I was not aware of the chipping problem. I think I will try some recycled carts to see what I will see. Costco will, I think, refill my used carts, I wonder if that would cause a problem?

Theron.

Rod, I looked up this printer, and I see that it has a "Go" button. Do you know if that is like a "Select" or "Online" button? I wonder if you press that button, would it take the printer offline and stop the print job?

Alternatively, you could always pull out the paper tray and/or flip the power switch. I've done both on several occasions.

Jerry, I used your method, but it was well after the original glitch, and it didn't have any effect,
I had already removed the paper tray.
When it first happens, the operator is struck with panic, the machine spits out pages rapidly, and you have
no time to collect your thoughts and try different things.

I shall try it, next time it occurs (which I hope not)

Zuzu, that is a great idea, I have a "Go" button, and I'll hit that as a first response, next time.

If I recall correctly, even if you turn the rotten thing off, and reboot, the print run is still held in memory
and removing the print run in the drop down box is not helpful.

The corollary here is, I think, be careful when selecting "Print"

And just to add to Andy's rant, there are some HP printers that will not permit refilled cartridges. I have one.  (Obviously, did not know that when I bought  it.)

Also like Andy, I will never buy an HP printer again. And I say that reluctantly -- I was an HP employee back in the past, working at their headquarters in Palo Alto (back when both H & P were alive and around), as well as working with another division that shared the same building as the printer division.

I personally believe it was Carly Fiorina who did more to damage the company than any other senior executive (and there were others who caused a lot of damage). At her direction, the company transformed from being an engineering company to a marketing company. It was an outstanding engineering company.

Never again.

-- Dave

I have had three Epson inkjet printers in years gone by but its been long enough now that I can't remember which models they were. I bought inkjets because at the time laser printers were just way too expensive. It may be diff. now with the newer models coming out but I would have to disagree with you Andy that Epson's don't come with starter cartridges. All three of mine did and with at least one it even said so within the instruction/spec sheets ( not sure if the others said so or not). I remember specifically because after one of my purchases the next time I was in the store I gave the salesman a hard time about it for the fact that the exterior packaging claimed X amount of pages per print cartridge but no where on the outside of the box did it tell you "just not with the ink provided". It was only after you paid for it and got it home that you were informed from the paperwork inside the box that it told you the cartridges were only half full. I was a little ticked at the time.

Again, it may not be so now with newer Epson models but with the ones I had it would in fact do a cleaning cycle every time you turned the printer on. Also, during a long print job it would occasionally pause in the middle to do a cleaning cycle. When the jets did become clogged and you started to see lines in your print jobs just doing one cleaning would not always fix the problem, sometimes you had to do multiple cleaning cycles. I can't remember exactly where I read it but one time when I was having problems with the quality of the printing and went looking for answers I came across a statement that said a full one third of the ink from the cartridges goes towards cleaning cycles based on how the printer's software is set up, not do to user activated cleaning cycles, user activated cleanings used more over and above. Not sure if that is a true statement or not but it wouldn't surprise me based on how many pages I got per set of cartridges.

All three of my Epson inkjets were tossed do to clogged jets that just couldn't be cleaned/fixed. The last one, I ran out of ink when I went to clean it, so bought a new set of cartridges, couldn't get the cartridges clean so it got thrown out with pretty much $60 some odd dollars worth of ink in it.
Oh, something else I remember about them was that if one of the color ink cartridges ran out (mine had three color and one black ink cartridges) it wouldn't allow you to print until you replaced that one empty cartridge regardless of how full the other cartridges were.

I think most of the problems I had with mine was because overall I didn't do a lot of printing. It wasn't uncommon for the printer to sit for 2 to 4 weeks unused.

The printer I have now is a Samsung B&W Laser. I really, really like it. It doesn't care if I let it sit for six months without using it, haven't had any problems with it at all. The quality of even the standard setting (not the "Best Quality" setting) is still great. I'm on either my second or third toner cartridge now after the original one. Printing is ten times faster (or more) than the inkjets were. It does take up a lot of desktop space, probably twice the size of what the inkjets were. It is a basic model, I think it was $89.00 Cdn. at Staples.

Rick