All right. Just popped into the middle of this discussion on full waste ink pad.
I've contended with this before on an old HP inkject that had precisely this error. On that inkjet, there was no sensor. What there was was a counter that kept track of the ink ejected into the waste ink pad whose value was saved in a EEPROM inside the machine, meaning that said EEPROM value could save its value across power resets and such.
Through some skullduggery a user found out what the reset code was for that printer. It involved the usual suspects: Standing on one foot on a Friday in May while a vigin's tear dropped on a snowflake, etc. But it was doable.
Being an engineer, I decided to clean said pad. And, yeah, I do take apart some fairly complex pieces of hardware for a living, sometimes without much in the way of documentation, too. So, with note-taking pad and pencil, and the ability to sketch in hand, I took apart said printer until I could get to the pad.
Say what you want, but that pad was full. Got it out, took it to the sink, and for a half hour or so got it clean. Dried it back out somewhat (the ink's somewhat water soluble), put it all back together, ran through the reset sequence, and the printer continued to work for a year or so.
Given that it took me most of a day to go through the procedure, and it would probably take at least an hour or so for a compent techie to do the same work, not to mention having spare pads on hand, with the ever-present danger of snapping some never-meant-to-be-taken-apart piece of plastic, I can begin to understand an argument that Canon doesn't want to fix a saturated ink pad, seeing as the cost to repair (again, time & money) would be more than that of a new printer.
However, there are poor starving college students and what all that have more time than money who would be glad to take a whack at it. And people like me who actually liked the printer I had better than the printer (no rear input tray) that Canon was trying to sell me. And it bugs the living bejeezus out of me that $0.50 worth of screws and a designed-in panel in the bottom would make it trivial to fix that pad.
And what really gets me is that, by this time, if there was a true reset sequence for that EEPROM, somebody would have extracted same out of some repair manual or other. If there's not, it's exactly like buying a car that, even though it's in fine working condition, except for some elderly engine coolant, disables itself because some manager/marketeers/idiots with business degrees wants to (a) not waste money making the engine coolant replaceable and (b) want to force the issue by making the consumer buy a new car. In my mind, this isn't much different than the occasional auto glass repair guy (this really happens in NYC), who runs around with a baseball bat busting in car windows. Yeah, not all of the car windows were going to end up in his shop; but enough of them were to make it worthwhile. That idiot got caught, charged, and tossed in jail, and the window shop he worked in got put out of business.
Remember: Resetting such an EEPROM is s trivial, durn-near-zero-cost thing to do. If Canon purposely set that up, they deserve to go out of busiiness, especially as they didn't warn consumers that "after-X-deciliters-of-ink-we're-going-to-disable-this-printer-with-no-option-to-repair". I'd like to see the judge who'd let that one pass.
KBeck
