HP PSC Printer Ink Refill

What I like the best about the HP PSC 2510 is that I can refill the black ink cartridge with cheap bulk ink, and thereby save money. HP compatible pigment bulk ink tends to work fine, however it involves drilling a very fine hole in the ink cartridge for injecting the ink through. Bulk ink for the HP PSC series is readily available from many online stores, and worth looking around for the best deal. Whilst other brands of printers expect both the colour and black cartridges to be full before printing, on this printer you can leave the colour cartridge (HP57) empty, and only refill the black cartridge (HP56), for standard letter printing.

Sneaky Firmware

This printer has a very sneaky firmware and it knows if you are refilling the cartridges. It will let you remove the cartridge and return it a limited number of times, since you may need to remove the cartridge during transportation, or perhaps for cleaning the print head. However, if you do this too often it assumes you are refilling and suddenly an error message appears stating "Remove and check cartridge in the right stall." During this time, the power LED will blink. Once you get this message, the ink cartridge will no longer work on any printer and then you have to replace the cartridge.

I cannot take credit for this discovery though; my sister who is a poor student figured it out. She explained that once the chip on the cartridge was "zapped" it would not work. My contention was always that the electrical contacts on the cartridge and in the stall may require cleaning, but she proved me wrong!

To prevent this from happening again, she had a workaround solution for when the cartridge required refilling. Simply lift the top lid so that the cartridge returns to the centre position ready for removal. Then pull the power plug out from the back thus cutting the power to the printer. Then remove the ink cartridge, refill it, and return it to the stall. Then connect the power cord back. Without power, the firmware has no way of knowing if the user removed the cartridge!

Out of Date Ink

I had some expensive cartridges I bought at a sale, which I was saving for printing an album for my friends at an elderly care home, unfortunately to my annoyance, the cartridges went out of date and would not work! I noticed that the printer has no internal clock and therefore has no way to keep track of the date. The only way it can determine the date is from the PC, through the USB link. During initialisation when the printer makes connection with the PC, the transfer of date information occurs.

The solution then is to set back the date on the PC when using out of date ink cartridges. However if the firmware detects only once that the cartridge is out of date, it will "zap" it and the cartridge will no longer work even when setting back the date. When the cartridges are out of date, strangely, it will not tell you that. Instead, the error message is very cryptic: "Remove and check print cartridges". Once you see this message, the cartridge will no longer work on any printer.

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