Color Craziness

My Significant Other was in a bit of a tiff the other day. He has a Brother multifunction unit, which he uses in his home office to fax, print, and do the occasional copy (and which I borrow shamelessly when I need to).

Like many of us, he doesn't do a lot of color printing. The occasonal Web page, sometimes a little color to spice up his business cards... But mostly, it's simple, black-print documents. He even, as I do, sometimes prints color pages in black simply to save on the ink.

However, even used judiciously, ink will get used up -- even color ink. Yesterday, the machine informed him that he was almost -- I repeat, almost -- out of yellow ink. It then refused to print. Anything.

His first question was -- okay, so I can't print any colors. Fine. I've got several manuscript pages I need to get out; why can't I simply do basic black printing? Surprisingly, most color desktop printers these days do not allow you to continue printing in black ink if any of the color cartridges are spent. This can be a source of great irritation to those of us who aren't color mavens. Is it possible that the technology is so stubborn that there is no way to tell a printer that it's okay to do black printing if any of the colors are out? You wouldn't think so.

However, that wasn't the end of the story. In looking through the printer's menus in order to try to find a way around the problem, my S.O. accidentally hit the command that prints out a test page -- the kind that printers do to check the print heads, etc. Not only did the printer immediate print out that page, but it included a lovely, well-saturated square of yellow ink. From, presumably, the cartridge that was so low that it was dangerous to let him print out his business documents.

Thus, his irritation. He says that he's going to find out why, if the cartridge is not totally out of ink, the printer is not letting him use it. Is there some great danger to the print if the cartridge goes dry in the middle of a print run? Or is it simply a way for manufacturers to find yet another way of increasing ink sales? Stay tuned.