Posted by Jason Quintana, One of many engineers who brought you the Photosmart 8150 and 8750 printers
Joelincoln wrote:
"Stacie, good luck in your new career as blogmaster. I'm a happy owner of an 8150 and an 8750. As an amateur photographer, I am very pleased with the performance of these printers. My only gripe is that the software warns of low ink levels long before the ink cartridge is ready for replacement. I've learned to basically ignore these warnings and just wait until a picture prints incorrectly to replace the cartridge. Can't something be done to more accurately gauge the amount of available ink?"
Stacie thought that this might make a good topic for a post, so she asked me to write one, and here it is.
As always there are long answers and short answers.
Let's try a medium answer. With the Ink Level Gauge (ILG) there are a couple points that are of particular interest, Low On Ink (LOI), and Out Of Ink (OOI). Most people seem to relate well to ILG in terms of a car's gas gauge. The ILG is somewhat like a gas gauge, LOI is like the “alert” light, and OOI is like walking down the highway to the nearest gas station.
On a high level, the “alert” light should always come on before you are forced to walk to the gas station. If it doesn't then what's the point of having it? But, there are some key differences between the LOI warning and a gas gauge “alert” light. People generally fill up their car before running out of gas, so they don't actually know how accurate the gas gauge and alert light are vs. how accurate they perceive them to be.
The gas gauges in cars use a gas level sensor in the gas tank to determine how much gas is left. Inkjet printers, on the other hand, generally only estimate as best they can how much ink is left by estimating how much ink has been used since the supply was first installed. Because consumers use ink differently, what they print and under what circumstances, there is naturally some variability in the estimate of how much ink has been used. And there is some variability in the amount of ink that the system may get out of a particular supply. This all leads to some variability in the estimate of how much ink remains at the LOI point.
Going back to giving a LOI warning before OOI, that means to ensure that a LOI warning is always given before OOI, the LOI point has to be set at a point when some customers will be nearly OOI and some customers may still be able to print a number of pages.
Then, there is the fact that cars have only one gas tank while inkjet printers usually have 4 to 6 inks, each with its own ILG. That means the LOI might be given for an ink that is not used much on subsequent prints, possibly delaying the onset of OOI visible in a print. Or the next prints could use a lot of low ink and show visible OOI sooner.
I think that might have been more like long than medium.
Ok, so that's why, but can anything be done to make it better? Once again, long and short, but let’s try medium. While we continually update and improve our products and their features, there are limits with the LOI warning given other needs and requirements of customers and the available technology. As new technology is developed, we try to incorporate it into new printers where appropriate. For example, the HP Photosmart D7360, and all products that use the HP02 series of supplies, include a sensor to assist the ILG with LOI and OOI.
Posted
06-28-2007 10:30 PM
by
Stacie Savage