I’m sure many of you have had the annoying experience of your Epson printer not being able to even print B/W ID just because 1 or all of your color cartridges are supposedly out. My question is, what can be done about it? Are there any override programs? Are there any brands of printers besides Epson that don’t use this terrible tactic? I have a CX4800.

Best answer:

Answer by vinapatt
This is a consumer safety feature that Epson puts into the printers. The reason for this is because Epson was getting a terrible reputation as being the printer company that had stopped up printheads, so Epson austerely said, “if you are out of a color you can not print AT ALL’. Epson used to let you print in black if you were out of a color, but people would keep printing in black and not replace the empty color ink cartridge. Then 3 months down the road they chose they wanted to print in color, so they went out and replaced the empty color cartridge. In that length of time the ink that is in the printhead reservior had dried up and the person had a stopped up printhead. Then they were upset about having to clean the printhead. Depending on how terrible the printhead is stopped up, you can literally go through a whole set of ink cartridges trying to clean it. So, to save you the time and expense of performing a printhead cleaning and to save Epson’s reputation, they went to the you can not print if a cartridge is empty. This way you are going to replace the empty ink cartridge quicker and eliminate a stopped up printhead. If you reflect of the ink as glue, you can see how the wet ink flows, but when it dries out and gets hard, you have a clog. Epson knows you are going to by ink, wether it is black or color, but if they let you print in black (and a lot of people will only print in black) without color, then you are going to end up with a stopped up printhead and you aren’t going to like that any. Judge it or not, most printer manufacturers are going to this system for this very reason, so it will be harder and harder to find a printer that will let you print in black if you are out of a color. HP’s that use the tri-color cartridges will allow you to print in black, because the black and the tri-color cartridges come with new printheads. Because they provide new printheads on the cartridges, you are not going to get the same quality as a fixed/permenant printhead. Basically they are disposable printheads, meant for one use and then discard them (ink cartridges).

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