levels on ink cartridges

[Curtis Cunningham]

Which cartridges (other than Canon) allow you to actually see the level of ink left in the cartridge?

I've been a fan of being able to see through the transparent casing on my cartridges for my Canon iP5000, but as I need to upgrade my printer, I'm not sure if I get any other brand if I'll still be able to do this.

I've been reading a bit about some Epson models (2400, 3800), and the HP 9180. It looks like the HP cartridges are completely opaque, but I wonder if the 9180 printer allows you to see on some sort of screen what the levels for each cartridge are at. I used to use a HP500 printer, and on the control panel I could find out what percentage of ink each cartridge had left in it.

[BobSmith]

The Epson pro series printers give fairly detailed stats on the amount of ink used and remaining. You can find out how many mililiters of each color were used on a given page... and how many square cm or area was covered... if you want such info. And every Epson I've ever used would give a graphical indication in either the driver or a maintenance utilty where you could see the percentage of ink remaining in each cart. The pro series printers display this info on the printer itself as well. All of these indicators are simply based on a counter that tracks how many times a given color nozzle was fired. It's not like a gas guage in your car where the actual level remaining is measured. Epson printers... especially the big ones... will go very very bad if air is sucked into the lines between the cart and the heads. You don't ever want to run them completely dry. The carts are designed to be replaced when there's still a small amount of ink remaining in the cart so that no air gets into the lines... and that residual ink is allowed for in the various counting mechanisms.

Bob Smith