More on printers

I think people who use computers probably have fewer problems, on average, with their computers than with their printers. I've written about printers on a number of occasions: they certainly provide more to write about than computers do. So far.

I've had Epson printers and Canon printers (currently have one of these) and a Dell printer, and dot matrix printers (exceptionally reliable machines, but not much use for the age of the Internet) and some other printer beginning with H (not a Hewlitt Packard).

My brand new Canon printer MG5150 has been announcing over the last day or so that the black ink was getting low - would I like to go online and order a new cartridge? Well, I could have done, but one of the reasons I bought this machine was so that I could buy cartridges from Cartridge World - they're usually better in price, and they do refills.

Anyway, I went to CW today and bought a new black cartridge. I said I thought it was rather odd that the printer seemed to be using the small black cartridge instead of the big one (Canon provides two black cartridges in this model: one that is used with the colour cartridges and one that's your day to day text printing). The bloke behind the counter asked me what I was printing out? I said mostly 'music files' (by which I meant Sibelius files). He scoffed: you can't print music files. Well, that's right - even I know you can't print MP3 files and such. I said it was printed music from Sibelius. He said I should be turning them into pdfs first otherwise they print out as graphics. I said I thought this a little odd, as I'd never had to do this before. He said I hadn't had a printer with two black cartridges before.

Hmmm.

Anyway, I got home only to discover that I'd misread the information the printer had sent me and that it was the large cartridge which had run out. Which meant that the printer was using the large ordinary everyday cartridge for printing my Sibelius files. LOL.

Rang my daughter to see if she could pick me up a large cartridge. She went into the shop and they told her that the factory that produced these cartridges, in Japan, had been demolished in the earthquake/tsunami. No cartridges available. However, they could refill the cartridge but it wouldn't show up on my printer as being full (!)

Well, this was better than nothing, so in the end I made another trip to town (so much for saving petrol) and gave them the cartridge to refill. Told them that I'd made a mistake about which cartridge was being used for the music files, and the feller behind the counter still manage to make it sound as though he'd been right all along. Cheeky beggar!