During the past couple of weeks I received an e-mail from David asking me for advice and if possible help with a problem he has with a printer. The problem was that the low ink warning light was permanently flashing even though he had had the cartridges re-filled.

David told me that to try to correct this problem he contacted the manufacturers, Dell, but ended up with a call centre who were no help at all and that he had also gone through the Dell troubleshooting pages without any luck. He did end up with a page suggesting he phone the tech support at a cost of £39, which he thought was too much for a simple answer to "How to cancel the flashing warning light?"

The answer to the email is quite long and complex -so here goes. Dell do not manufacture printers themselves they re-badge other printer manufacturers such as Lexmark. It is not in the printer manufacturers' interest to allow you to use a cheaper product which is not of their own manufacture.

Printer manufacturers, in fact, do not manufacture ink either. They have the ink made by a third party. These inks have cleaners, anti-clogging agents and a good colour spectrum in them. There are, however, some ink manufacturers who are not licensed by the printer manufacturers but whose product is equally good, if not better, than the printers spec. There are, of course, others who produce inferior ink.

The printer manufacturers soon cottoned on that there were copy cartridges been sold and that cartridges were being re-filled. To combat this they decided that the amount of pages you would be able to print from a cartridge with a 7% coverage would be around 300 pages. The ink in these cartridges could quite easily print up to 450 pages, so they put a chip in, which is programmed to allow you to print only 300 pages. (Please note if you print in photographic quality you will get significantly fewer pages.)

With this chip system the manufacturers can control and maintain a high price for the ink products to such a point that there is an European Commission set up to investigate the prices throughout Europe.
Back to the chip - some companies have overcome this by producing their own cartridges and chips as an alternative which are considerably cheaper than the originals and of a good quality. These are generally manufactured in the EU and one of the best alternative brands is manufactured in the UK. But be very wary of those manufactured in China, they are often very cheap and of an inferior quality.

So, finally, the answer to your flashing low ink warning light, david. Sorry. Unless you have a very expensive chipping machine you cannot reset your printer to stop flashing.

The company which re-filled your cartridges has obviously been able to reset the counter chip which allows you to print a lot more copies but they have not been able to beat the manufacturers chipping methods.

I am sorry I cannot be of more help to you.

That's all for this week Surfers, and as usual safe surfing.

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