Ricoh 3110 on or off?

[Simon]

I've had a ricoh 3110 for a couple of months now but it seems to chewing through my inks at a rate of knots. (We leave it on all the time as suggested).

My family are only hobbiest, so we dont use it every day, but in that time, black ink is down to 62% and the other colours 38-39% and the waste ink tank up to 22%. I'd say we'd only done around 20 a4 full colour prints.

This seems an excessive amount of waste to me and ink carts are expensive enough!

So is there much detriment to only turning it on as and when we need it?

Thanks

Simon

[socialgiraffe]

Hi Simon

I have a back up A4 Ricoh that is always turned off. I turn it on every so often and run a few prints to ensure it is still working and I have never had a problem. Have occasionally had to do a head clean though.

Not saying that this will work for you but it certainly does for me.

[Simon]

Thanks for the reply
it really shouldn't be wasting 1% of ink every couple of days though, should it? Does it waste a lot of ink on start up when you do use it?

[socialgiraffe]

Personally it does seem a bit much. Problem is that as this is my back up machine I have never really paid any attention to how much ink is uses when starting up. What I do know is that the carts in there have been there for a couple of years I think.

I run a Ricoh 7000 as my main machine and as this is used every day constantly it doesn't go through that many cleaning cycles either.

There is a wealth of information on the Sawgrass website so there maybe something about it on there.

Bear in mind that the ink remaining indicators are not that accurate either. You will notice that the indicator on your computer will show different levels to the one on the indicator panel on the printer. Both of them are not that great.

On a completely different note, I have a little HP laserjet. I recently ran a heat transfer job through it and after 100 pages it popped up with Magenta Low which was a brand new cartridge. However HP state that it uses the first 5% of a cartridge use to determine how long that cartridge will last. So if I ran 50 pages with a full coverage Magenta it will presume every page will use that much Magenta and subsequently tell you that the cartridge is low even though you may not have used any magenta after the subsequent 50 pages. The reason I am saying this is because it MAY be the same for other ink level indicators, its certainly true for my Roland Versacamm which has had the black as "almost empty" for over 30 meters now.

[Simon]

My printer is installed over my network, I was led to believe these ink figures on the network page were fairly accurate; and i've checked and compared via the printer service menu. I don't trust the LCD panel.
I have started to daily log the amount of ink being 'syphoned' from the carts to get a true picture of what is happening.
I have to say I was shocked when I first installed the carts to see over 50% of my ink disappear almost immediately :gulp:

[socialgiraffe]

I don't think it went anywhere apart from filling the tubes from cartridge to print head. I know that brand new printers do seem to use a lot of ink initially as they need to fill the tubes etc.

[Simon]

Yeah, it was one of the things I checked out soon after it happened

Can anyone else share their experiences of whether to leave on or switch off their ricoh?

[viccar]

I leave mine on 24/7, (3mths old now) but then it is used almost every day (not weekends)

it did use just over 50% when it first primed the tubes, but since then i have not noticed a great dip and the inks are on about 40% now 60%black, i
m halfway through my second pack of 100 sheets paper, so quick calculation is about 5% of each ink for 100 sheets, although this is not all full coverage or exact.

I suppose it would depend more on if you are printing full coverage as to how much ink is used. I have found no great loss of ink leaving it on.

Hope that helps.

There is a video on how to check inks somewhere.

[viccar]

I leave mine on 24/7, (3mths old now) but then it is used almost every day (not weekends)

it did use just over 50% when it first primed the tubes, but since then i have not noticed a great dip and the inks are on about 40% now 60%black, i
m halfway through my second pack of 100 sheets paper, so quick calculation is about 5% of each ink for 100 sheets, although this is not all full coverage or exact.

I suppose it would depend more on if you are printing full coverage as to how much ink is used. I have found no great loss of ink leaving it on.

Hope that helps.

There is a video on how to check inks somewhere.

http://www.dyesubforum.co.uk/vbforum/sh ... ink-levels

[SciArtImages]

Simon,

I turn off my Ricoh (the 3300) and sometimes it's not used for a few weeks. Never had any problems.

Neil.