Have you ever had a good look at your Epson print cartridge? Did you notice the microchip on the side? According to Epson, this chip is used to determine how much ink is actually left in the print cartridge. When the printer ink gets to a certain level you can no longer print. Unfortunately however, it appears that the chip actually causes the printer to cease functioning even though  there is more printer ink still left in the cartridge. Some say you can get up to 50 more pages out of what is left.

Apart from any monetary gain Epson might get from doing this there is also another important reason. It is to prevent the print cartridge from going completely dry and thus causing damage to your printer. This is important to note as tools available on the net to reset the chip may result in problems if the cartridge dries out completely. It can also void your warranty so be extremely careful. So keeping this in mind, the following are methods of extending the life of your Epson ink cartridges.

Firstly you can purchase a chip re-programming tool. This resets the printer cartridge chip to when you purchased it so your printer thinks that there is plenty of ink left. Some of these tools require you to remove the print cartridge, however, removing the cartridge can cause air bubbles to occur so you may need to run the cleaning function on your printer a few times to clear it.

The best chip re-setting tools are those that don’t require you to remove the print cartridge. These can be small devices that plug into your printer. When your Epson printer lets you know that you are out of printer ink you just press a button on the device to reset the chip.

There are also software programs out there which do much the same thing however, they are not available for every Epson print cartridge.

You will need to do a bit of research on the net to find the right option for you. There are a lot of different tools available at the moment and most at a price. However, in the end they just might save you some money.