Printers... Sigh

I’ve had a decent Brother MFC for a while. Its good for day to day stuff. Its passable at photos. It can do multiple page scans to Google Drive.

My only major beef with it is that it devours ink. Wanted to work on a photo project and 2 color tanks where just about on E. Tried a calibration print. Yeah, loads of clogged nozzles. Sigh. The built in cleaning cycle drinks ink like coffee.

I was a little surprised it was able to finish the cleaning cycle without complaining about running out of ink. Printed out the calibration page again. Ok, that’s much better. Only a few cells seemed be blocked. Uh, oh. Those 2 low tanks are now empty.

Pop in replacements and printed my job. Just 12 4x6 photos. Yup, 2 colors are now almost empty again. 😡

I’ve got to get the kid out of the house for a bit… can I get ink for the same price as Amazon at the Staples down the street? Meh, its a dollar more at Staples.

Head over to Staples and rummage around through the sea of Brother cartridges. Uh, ugh, I thought the website said they had them in stock but nope. They did have the XL version that supposedly 2x the ink of the normal ones. All for just 2X the price of the regular ones. 🤷

Got home, carefully confirmed that the cartridges are indeed the right ones for my machine and they are. I was expecting the XL versions to look different, but they appear to be exactly the same as the regular versions but just have XL badging on them.

So, it seems the regular cartridges I’ve been using up to now actually have enough space internally to hold twice the amount they normally include. Grumble.