Zeroing of cartridges

It's no secret that the main revenues of companies that produce inkjet printers are not formed from the sale of printers, but from the subsequent supply of their consumables. But not every user is able to pay $ 50 for one cartridge to the printer. In addition, the prices for some sets of these consumables, including several individual cartridges, go up to 8,000 rubles.

Learning how much new cartridges cost, many are trying to find out if there is any specialized software / program for zeroing the cartridges or how they can be refilled.

Given such a price policy of producers, as well as huge demand from below, it is not surprising that alternative versions of filling for jet equipment began to appear in the world. A variety of technologies and systems CISS (continuous ink supply system) pressed products in the printers of end users, "original" both in the place of production and at cost.

The main players in the inkjet market, HP, Epson and Samsung, felt threatened by their almost monopoly position and began to develop retaliatory protection measures designed to prevent the ink cartridge that has run out of ink or to replace it with a compatible one.

So on the new cartridges there were systems of electronic accounting of the state. At the end of ink, their task is to signal the printer that this cartridge is not suitable for further work, even if then ink is added to it again. In such a simple way, a loophole was blocked, with which the cartridge could be refilled an infinite number of times.

Now the microchip built into each cartridge is equipped with a counter that, using information about the maximum possible number of printed pages, compares the number of already transmitted through the printer sheets with this maximum value. As soon as the manufacturer calculates that there should not be a drop of ink remaining in the tank, the printer gives an error and requires replacing the ink tanks.

But this system has one significant drawback. For example, you have a lot of work on printing sheets filled with text for 10%, you, of course, expect from your printer a long work. But after all, each sheet is considered a system, and there is another 50% of ink in the banks, and the printer already issues a warning about the need for an early replacement of the cartridges, since, in the counter's opinion, you have used up all the ink.

What to do in this case? Throw out the ink tanks and buy new ones?

Naturally, the service workshops that earned money on refueling various printers, immediately began to look for ways how to perform zeroing of cartridges blocked by the ink level control system.

There are several ways to cope with this problem.

If a simple chip replacement is allowed in laser cartridges, then it is much more difficult to do this in inkjet printers, since the chips are executed in the same unit together with the control circuit of the ink tanks that supply the ink for printing. So the easiest way is to zero out the cartridges.

For many Epson printers, there are programmers with which you can easily and safely carry out this operation. Also, it is allowed to zero the cartridges with the help of the service program, but I would not advise doing this to people who do not have full information about what they are going to do and how. It is better to leave such methods to engineers.

And for ordinary users, programs like "zeros", universal versions for many types of cartridges are written a lot.

For HP printers that have a series of ink hoppers starting at 9XX, there is an unconventional way to perform a zeroing of the cartridges. The fact is that the cartridge identifier in this series is stored in the printer itself, and in order for the latter to perceive the refilled cartridge, it is necessary to "turn" a few simple actions. Print a few test pages, each time replacing the cartridges with others, after a few printouts, the printer forgets the ID of your old cartridge and, once installed, will take it back as a new one.