Pro9000 Mark 11 Excessive Ink Consumption Question

[DaveLamb]

Hi,

I am new to the board. I purchased my Pro9000 Mark 11 for home hbby use in October 2012 and printed about 8 - 8X10's, then left the machine idle until June 2013. 

Upon starting the machine up - found most of the tanks to be empty, installed a new set.

In July and August printed about 6 - 8X10's. The tanks were 80% full.

Since then I have used only the grayscale to print about 10 pages of black office documents, just simple text on plain paper.

Now the color tanks are almsot all empty.

Each time I start the machine it seems to cycle for about 3 minutes before printing the black text document.

I am wondering why my color tanks went from 80% to 10% (or zero) during the time I did no photo printing.

Possibly do i have an auto clean setting wrong?

I have anew set of color cartridges to instal, but would like to get some advice before I install.

Thanks in advance,

Dave

p.s. is there a 'general rule of thumb' on how many color 8X10 can be printed on a new set of tanks?

[ebiggs1]

First, the printer uses all the cartridges to print black.  It does NOT use simply the black cartridge.  So, if you printed nothing but B&W you would still run out of color ink.

Second, printing every 8 months is not going to be the best useage of the printer to get the max cost savings on ink.  I suspect you are losing most of it to cleaning the print nozzles.

There is no way to guess what the avaerage user will get in ink cost.  What is an average print or an average user?  Mosy of my prints may have a blue sky in them and mos tof your may have a coal mine in them.  So, how much does it coat each of us?  I will use more blue and you will not.

However, Red River paper company has come up with a pretty good estimate of ink per print cost.  It is here, if you care to look.