Here’s one inspired by the folks who take your phone calls each day.

“My printer’s ink level monitor says my cartridges are full, but they won’t print. What can I do?”

This is a pretty typical question. Most folks are very quick to blame the problem on their printer cartridge, especially if they are using a non-manufacturer brand cartridge. Ah, don’t be so quick to blame the cartridge for the trouble, there is another possible cause:

Your printer nozzles might be clogged.

Ink often builds up in nozzles when the printer is not used to often. When you print the ink is wet and a small amount remains in the nozzles (nozzles direct ink on to the paper). If you do not print frequently and keep moist ink in the nozzles, the ink inside will dry. Once dried a semi-solid plug will form within the nozzle. This blocks ink from moving though the nozzle and on to the page.

Take a look at your printer’s user manual. There is often a warning in there about how often one should print. Customer feedback has shown us that unless one prints every 3-5 days they are more likely to experience clogged nozzles.

As a remedy, each manufacturer suggest that you run a cleaning utility, most commonly known as a head cleaning utility. This primes the components of the printer and should blow out any blocks in your nozzles. It is recommended that you run this utility 3-4 times if you are experiencing trouble and at least once before you print. Most printers automatically run the utility when you turn them on. Keep in mind, this does use a very small amount of ink.

So, next time you have some trouble, don’t automatically assume it is the cartridge. Check your nozzles!

Let us know what you think.

This is an example of the power of the consumer.

We found a report today that in the first three months of this year more than $320 million dollars was spent on new printers. That’s more than $100 million a month!

Printer sales in China were up 4.1% from the same time last year, and these numbers do not include consumables such as ink, toner, and paper. It is reported that consumables provide up to two-thirds of printer market revenues. If that is the case, you can tack another $200 million plus on to that $320 million.

So, with all this buying going on, who was the big winner? Hewlett Packard. Just about 33% of the printers sold were manufactured by HP. Twenty-one percent of the market went to Epson and about 14% went to Canon. These percentages add up to 21 million printers being shipped in China in January, February, and March.

Amazingly enough, the Chinese really have no presence in the printer manufacturing business. They do, however, have a large presence in the consumables market, selling remanufactured and compatible inkjet cartridges.

Let’s end with one more staggering number. By 2010 it is expected that the money spent on laser printers alone will exceed $5 billion.

If you have any thoughts, let Pacific Ink know what you think.

(Thanks to Infomatics.com for the story)

Here is some help for a question we get quite often – “My printer won’t work, what can I do?”

This happens more than one would think. It us usually pretty easy to get your printer back up and running, if you know a few of these tricks. Okay, they aren’t really that tricky, but they will do the trick. We find it amazing how many help guides there are out there with these same suggestions and how many times this topic has been discussed online. But, the bottom line is that people are still having trouble finding the information when they need it. So, we’ll take our turn and put it out there one more time.

So, you’ve created your wonderful document, or prepared that wonderful picture and you are ready to print. You click the print button and . . . nothing! What do you do now?

First, do the obvious. Check your printer cartridges. They may be out of ink. If they are you will need to buy more. If you do still have ink in your printer cartridges (your ink level monitor should keep you informed of the amount of printer ink you have) then move on and check the cables (USB or Parallel) that connect your printer to your computer. For that matter, you should check to make sure the printer is still plugged in and is receiving power – Don’t laugh, you’d be surprised how often the solution to the problem is making sure the printer is powered on.

If none of this works you are on to step 2, checking your print queue. There may be other documents that are clogging up your print queue and preventing your current document from reaching its destination, your inkjet printer. To check your print queue simply do the following

Click on START
Click CONTROL PANEL
Click PRINTERS AND OTHER HARDWARE
Click Printers AND FAXES
Double click on the icon with your printer’s name

This will open the documents window for your printer and you can clear any documents in your print queue by selecting CANCEL ALL DOCUMENTS from the PRINTER drop down menu.

If you get to your inkjet printer’s print queue and it is empty, or you clear it and it still does not work you should try to print a test page directly from your printer. This will give you a better idea of where the problem lies. If you can print a test page directly from your printer then the problem is in the communication (connection) between your computer and your printer or within the printer software (drivers) on your computer. If you can’t print a test page, then the problem is with your printer.

Most printers now have a button, or a sequence of buttons you can push to print a test page. As it is different for each printer model, you will need to consult your printer’s user manual for directions.

You can also try to print something from a different program. We would suggest you use a simple word processing, or even better, Wordpad or Notepad. If you can print from one of these two programs then the problem is within the program you are trying to print from.

Hopefully this is helpful, and can prevent some hardships on your part. We’re happy to help, so if you get to a point in your tests, or find out what the problem is and don’t know what to do next, give us a call.

And, if you have any suggestions to add to these, please feel free.

You can also try to print something from a different program. We would suggest you use a simple word processing, or even better, Wordpad or Notepad. If you can print from one of these two programs then the problem is within the program you are trying to print from.

Hopefully this is helpful, and can prevent some hardships on your part. We’re happy to help, so if you get to a point in your tests, or find out what the problem is and don’t know what to do next, give us a call.

And, if you have any suggestions to add to these, please feel free.

Add this one to our ever growing list of uses for inkjet printers.

Nanoident Technologies, a company in Linz, Austria is producing organic semiconductors (microchips) by spraying intricate patterns of specialized ink onto layers of foil and polymer. How does it work?

A modified printer uses 128 inkjet nozzles to spray a pattern onto different layers of foil or polymer. They layers are then put together. Pretty simple!

Using this technology the company is capable of producing 40,000 square meters of semiconductors a year. Traditional methods can also produce 40,000 square meters a year, but at a much greater cost. It would cost about $1.3 billion and require 5,000 employees. The Nanoident printing method only costs $10 million and requires 50 people. Printed semiconductors also have larger features than the traditional silicon chips. They can be printed with more than 100 times the features inserted in to silicon chips.

Despite the advantages, the organic chips will not be put to use in computers. They are far slower and degrade faster than silicon chips. They will instead be used for single use applications.

This is a sad one.

The Glouchester County Times recently ran a story about a township council cutting $809,000.00 from their proposed school budget. Areas of reduction included transportation, employee health benefits, benefits paid to retirees, and $20,000 in each printer ink and supplies.

A $20,000 cut in printer ink supplies? What on earth are you doing spending so much in the first place? Honestly, give Pacific Ink a call we’ll work to save you some money so you can put some it back in to health benefits and retiree benefits. Those folks work hard and don’t deserve to have their benefits reduced.

Any thoughts from anyone out there?

HP and Kodak have introduced plans to save you some money on printer cartridges, but the immediate savings they offer might just cost you more in the long run — Cheaper ink cartridges aren’t really that much cheaper.

How is this possible you ask? The cartridge you were paying $30 for now only costs $15. What a bargain!

Not really, make sure to check just how much ink is inside that $15 cartridge.

Less ink in your cartridge means a lower cartridge price, but it also means a higher, or at least the same, cost per page when you actually get down to printing. In some cases you can also expect to pay more for the printer that uses these cartridges. Now you are left with a higher price tag on your printer and going through printer cartridges a lot quicker than you used to. All this from an idea that initially sounded as thought it would save you some money. Sorry.

Late last month HP unveiled their new black and color ink cartridges (we had something to say about that) priced at $14.99 and $17.99. These prices were lower than their previous $19.99 and $24.99 price points. In February 2007 both Kodak and Canon unveiled their less expensive printer cartridges. Kodak, new to the printer cartridge market, priced their cartridges at $9.99 and $14.99. Canon priced theirs at $15.99 and $19.99 (down from $19.99 and $24.99).

Some analysis of these new cartridges showed they contained less ink than those purchased at the old, higher price. Our friends at LYRA Research did some comparisons. One comparison showed that the older, higher priced HP cartridge contained 11ml of ink. The new, lower priced cartridge contained just 4.5ml of ink. As a result, the price per printed page goes up to 7.5 cents from 4.4 cents.

The same was true for Canon. Their new black cartridge contains 11ml of ink while their old cartridge contained 16ml of ink. Price per page goes up to 6.7 cents from 5.6 cents. The new color cartridges contain 9ml of ink (versus 12ml in the old). You’ll now spend an additional 1.7 cents per page.

And, what about Kodak? At this point all we know is that their printers cost more. About $50 more than the comparable printers made by HP and Canon. They have yet to release the amount of ink within their cartridges.

Just make sure you watch what you are buying. The price may look good, but check the amount of ink in the cartridge. Here’s a shameless Pacific Ink plug: Our remanufactured cartridges are filled to capacity and are priced to save you money. Give them a try!

We’ve taken a few days off since our last blog post, but we do have a good excuse. The time has been used to prep and launch the new Pacific Ink.com web site. When you have a few minutes you should head on over to Pacific Ink and check it out. We think you will like it.

We starting building the new site about a year go with some designs and what we thought were some solid e-commerce upgrades to our existing site. In a few months the entire site was built but we decided not to launch it. We can’t really say why, but something just didn’t seem right about it. At that point we shelved the project. Now that we look back, it was a good thing to do. The designs sat for 6 months.

One day we decided it was time to take a look at the site again. So we pulled it “off the shelves” and looked at the entire site with some fresh sets of eyes. Long story short, we had some great elements, but there were also some areas that were really lacking, so back to work we went.

The site you now see is one we are excited by and proud of. We viewed and tested many web sites, both within and outside of the printer cartridge industry. Many inspired features you now see at Pacific Ink. Many showed us things that should not be included in an e-commerce web site. You would be surprised at some of the things being done.

It probably doesn’t happen to often that a company explains some of the logic behind their web site, but we’d like to take a minute to share some of the thoughts that went in to designing the new Pacific Ink.com.

First, we realized that many web sites, ours included, have begun the trend of complicating the ordering and checkout process. Everyone talks about making the process easier, but take a look at the web sites you are shopping. It seems every day that more and more is being added to pages where you are simply supposed to purchase a product (upsell items, advertising links, reviews, commentaries, etc). While some of this is very useful and helps the customer with the purchasing decision it can also be distracting and sometimes frustrating. Perhaps some of the worst offenders are in the printer cartridge industry. They are filling their web site pages with extraneous text for reasons other than helping the customer buy the product they want.

Our goal was to strip the whole process down. Show you exactly what you want and then get out of your way. When you find the cartridge you need, or your printer model you will be able to view all other relevant products. We even removed the upsell screen (Do You Need Anything Else?) screen from the checkout process. It was simply too much. In time we will be adding aids to help customers make purchasing decisions, but be assured they will be added in a way that keeps the distraction to a minimum.

Second, provide subtle aids throughout the site to help the customer find what they need and then let them know they are in the right place. It sounds quite simple, but bigger images are better (and don’t have to slow down page loading speed). Customer research taught us that simply seeing the manufacturer brand box instantly let the customer know they were in the right place to buy the cartridges they needed. Same went for an image of their printer. By supplying queues such as these we can put customers in an assured state of mind and ease their purchasing process.

Third, we looked to improve our search feature. Some customers have already conducted a web search (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) to find us, so to make them go through another search process where they have to review a list of results just didn’t seem right. We spend the last 6 months working on our site’s search function with the goal of you providing 1 or 2 pieces of important data and then our system doing the rest. Our “little red box” may be similar in appearance to other search boxes out there, but believe that the technology behind it is very different. We’ll continue to work to refine the search formula to make it as easy as possible for the customer to find exactly what they need within a few seconds of arriving at our site.

Fourth, we simplified the checkout process. You’ve found what you need and now all you want to do it buy it. Our goal was to use this logic and clean up the checkout process. As we said earlier, we eliminated the product upsell screen during the checkout. It was just an extra click that was not necessary (customers already had all they wanted). We think you will find our checkout is right up there with some of the fastest and easiest on the web.

We could go on and on with more about how we designed this web site, but the bottom line is that we think it is good, and our test groups felt the same. We were so happy to see the high ease of use scores. So, enjoy the shopping experience and always make sure to let us know what you are thinking. We want to hear your ideas and suggestions.

Thank you so much for shopping with us!

You can save on ink and paper when you use this handy little software tool.

We came across this in PC World online. It is printer driver software called FinePrint 5.71, which gives you better control over what you print. We’ll paraphrase a little from the review, but you should check it out for yourself.

You can print up to 8 pages on a single sheet of paper without losing any print quality. We guess this is like a contact sheet you get with photographs. We have not tested out this feature yet, but it seems that it would make for some interesting, magnifying glass, reading. Pages can also be printed double sided to further conserve paper. Remember, you will need to manually turn the paper over and reinsert in to your printer unless you have a duplexer on your printer.

FinePrint works well with web pages, allowing you to print preview the web page you wish to print and make adjustments. You can scale the page to fit on a single page and remove any banner ads and other advertising images on the page. This is a pretty important feature as a follow up to a post we made the other day.

Finally, its makes say FinePrint will work with any printer, any standard Windows application, and any type of document. We’re still testing it out. If you’ve used it, let us know what you think.

By now most have heard about Staples no longer offering Staples brand remanufactured cartridges. They struck a deal with Hewlett Packard that would prevent them from carrying anything but HP brand cartridges in their stores.

We’ll provide more opinion on this later, but for now let’s address an issue we brought up in a previous post. We had previously discussed HP giving the consumer a chance to decided which types of printer cartridges they would like to use. One could say that a move like this severely inhibits the consumers ability to fairly decide between the HP brand and an alternative.

So, we must continue to do what we always do. Remind consumers that there are alternatives. The alternatives are often less expensive and more environmentally friendly than the HP branded product. At Pacific Ink we want to offer consumers a choice. If you want the HP brand cartridge, you can get it here. But, it will come with a postage paid plastic recycling bag you should use to recycle your empty cartridge — don’t throw it in the trash. The empty cartridges you send back in the bag are then remanufactured and sold as a remanufactured cartridge. Another alternative we offer. Are you a Do-it-Yourselfer? Then you would probably prefer one of our cartridge refill kits. We send you the ink and all the tolls. You refill the cartridge. Best of all, using remanufactured/recycled cartridges or refill kits will cost you less then using the HP brand product.

The remanufactured cartridge industry poses a threat to the printer manufacturers and the ink cartridges they sell. They have provided inexpensive printers to create a need for their expensive printer cartridges. The Staples - HP agreement means that when you go to a Staples to buy an HP printer, the only printer cartridges you will see there are HP brand cartridges. NO ALTERNATIVES!

Now maybe some folks don’t mind, but we hear from many each day that do. Staples is making it a little harder, but make sure you do your research on alternative sources for printer cartridges when making the decision as to which printer you will buy.

Give us your thoughts on Staples decision. We’ll follow up on this topic later.

Growing competition from vendors of compatible and remanufactured inkjet cartridges are having an effect on the bottom line of your printer’s manufacturer.

In a recent report it was shown that remanufactured and compatible cartridge supplies now own about 25% of Australia’s $1 billion market for toners and inkjet cartridges. Much of the purchasing of compatible and remanufactured cartridges has been the result of consumers and organizations adopting “Kermit’s Law” — It’s Keen to be Green, in their purchasing habits. That means recycled products are given first priority and have they have the added advantage of costing less.

To combat this your printer manufacturer has taken to offering a recycling service (see the little plastic bag included with your printer cartridge), and in some cases offering a remanufacturing service. We cannot locate a direct comment from any of the OEM’s concerning their interest in recycling printer cartridges, but we do know that by offering these services they have kept themselves in the running for lucrative government supply contracts. Is recycling truly an interest? Only they can answer that.