Print this

A 6-month-long experiment concluded today. The experiment, if it had enjoyed a title, would have been called something like "How long will printout continue to be usable in the face of dire warnings regarding ink levels from the Lexmark print dialog?"

Some background: Four or five times a year, I print off a set of posters for the Chorlton Players containing groups of the photos I've taken at dress rehearsal. Six pages of A4 in total. Back in January when I was printing the panto photos I had the first warning from Lex (the American guy who makes such handy announcements as "printing started" and "printing complete" just in case, you know, you hadn't noticed that the paper had started being fed through the machine, or stopped, respectively).

"Colour ink is low!" he declared in his pleasant, mid-Atlantic tones.

Well I was near the end of the run back then (why am I talking like a Texan in my head? I almost added "y'all" at the end there) so I didn't worry about it, and I don't print much colour stuff normally anyway. Just those nice little green Asda vouchers that pop out almost every week as a result of their "10% cheaper than every other store" claim.

So I continued to ignore the little red "X" in my colour cartridge silo, until it came time to print the next set of Players' photos, in March. Way back when I first started to do these posters, I'd reckoned on getting 3 sets out of a colour cartridge. The panto posters had been set #3 and that little red X had been glowering at me for a couple of months. But then I figured hey! Paper is cheap. Ink is expensive. Why don't I just carry on printing stuff out until it starts to fade? That way, I've only wasted a sheet of paper, and I'll have made sure that ALL the ink is used up.

The more quick-witted of you will probably have reached this conclusion several years ago. Sometimes, in prosaic matters such as these, I can be a bit slow.

Players Posters Set #4 printed off, in their entirety, without incident. I'd checked the little box to stop Lex warning me weeks before, so not only were the posters just dandy, but I didn't get nagged either.

Fast forward to the Players' annual comedy sketch show (normally known as the Hotpot show, but this year featuring a specially written farce cleverly embedding several sketches within it) and by this time there wasn't much black ink left either. So little, in fact, that I'd been warned several weeks previously that the cartridge was now on its reserve tank! Order your new cartridges immediately!

Naturally I'd bought replacement cartridges several months before, but I'd got the bit between my teeth now. No way I was replacing those damn cartridges now until they'd been bled completely dry. Dagnabbit!

The posters for Hotpot, aka Players Posters Set #5, printed off, in their entirety, without incident. Now THAT was a surprise, I can tell you. By the end of the run the little colour ink marker had been swapped out for a diluted, faded version no doubt intended to offer a compelling visual clue to the impending colourlessness of my printing. The black ink "X" had long since disappeared altogether, the black silo showing completely empty and devoid of any X, faded or otherwise.

That was back in May. Finally, today, I printed a letter and the last paragraph was illegible. So that's an expensive lesson learned. If I'd swapped out the cartridges when first warned, assuming there wasn't enough ink left to complete a poster run, I'd have missed out on almost half a year's worth of printing.

Paper is cheap. Ink is expensive. I'll remember that from now on.