I don't do a lot of printing, which is one reason I have only a relatively small, inexpensive printer. When I do print I don't kid around, however. Lately I've been trying my hand at printing out very large scale (for me, anyway) posters using the technique of tiling, in this case each tile is 8.5 x 11 cardstock. I've had this Pixma MG 2520 for several months now, and that is about how long the first set of cartridges lasted, given my infrequent use. Also, I wasn't doing anything but household-type stuff like letters with enclosures of scanned cartoons; since it was mostly black & white text, during those first three or so months I actually put in a new 245 cartridge but continued to use the original 246, even though both low-ink LED's eventually came on and stayed on. I kept using them until the printing started coming out wacky (at the end, an 8-bit grayscale photo of a 1949-era passenger plane had a sort of misty purple overtone in the lower half of the printed photo).
Which leads to what I'm actually asking about: I bought and installed a fresh 245 and 246 cartridge into the MG2520; no issues or problems. I got the prompt to align the print head, and went ahead and did that, too. I then prepared to print out my first attempt at one of those big posters I described above. Using Posterrazor, I converted a restored 8-bit RGB photograph, converted from grayscale so it was not an actual color photo (I needed to use photoshop filters that don't work in grayscale) with a resolution of 450 ppi. It would have printed out nice and sharp at 12 x 18 in it's original aspect ratio, but I turned it into a series of sixteen 8.5 x 11 tiles which, after allowing for the overlap, produced a nice, clear 28 x 35 poster. I was frankly surprised, however, to see that after printing a total of just 16 grayscale (no color or even tint) pictures, admittedly using every square inch of each sheet of that 8.5 x 11 cardstock and doing it very nicely, the "low ink - color" LED was and still is brightly lit. Is this a sign that something's out of order, or do I have unreasonable expectations about how much printing one can do with a standard (not XL) Canon cartridge?
The print quality still seems to be as good as ever, but not knowing for sure just when the printer's actual output will go off the rails again, maybe at a particularly bad time, and I might not have replacements immediately to hand...that's about the one thing I can do as an immediate solution--have the needed replacements. But I'd be interested in hearing about other user's experiences like mine and if there's a way to make the low-ink and/or the ink capacity reporting system do its job accurately.
