Reporting printer ink levels?

[Eric Bradshaw]

John Hupp,

I agree with Israel that the ink level reporting from HP is, in my experience, consistently provided with their drivers. I also find HP printers to be built better than Epson's; better quality hardware that typically lasts longer. But, despite all that, I've only set up HP printers for others.

For printing in my own home, I, like you, choose Epson. The two biggest drawbacks I've found are, as you said, the lack of ink level reporting and the sometimes painful-to-configure scanning and faxing (when I've actually had to fax). I've learned to live with all that because the Epson all-in-one printers I buy are typically under $100, the color is absolutely brilliant, networking (including wifi) is a breeze and they work and work and work - right up I until they don't. Typically about 2 years.

Unfortunately I've never solved the ink level reporting issue. I've just made sure I have ink in reserve for when my latest Epson literally stops printing because a particular color is out. If you get the ink level reporting issue solved, please share the steps. Otherwise, I'm okay. It's a minor annoyance. I hope you'll be okay with it too if you don't get the issue solved.

The drivers for Epson for Linux are available for every one I've owned so far. The following is a link to a page on our website that uses an Epson WorkForce 645 in an example for downloading PPD files (that reminds me, this page might need updating, but you'll get the idea);
http://computers4christians.org/FAQ/OS/HowTo/Print/Network.html

Eric
--
Thank You,
God Bless You,
Computers4Christians
http://Computers4Christians.org/


On 07/23/2014 11:35 AM, John Hupp wrote:
> A while back (under 13.04) I was working with an Epson Stylus C120 and
> got it installed for printing purposes after getting past
> http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/system-config-printer/+bug/1133794.
> I used CUPS and a Gutenprint driver.
>
> But unlike most Windows inkjet printer installations, I found no
> provision for reporting ink levels.  I found Mtink, but it did not work.
>
> In the meantime I stumbled onto the http://libinklevel.sourceforge.net
> project, which is a library for reporting ink levels.  And at
> http://libinklevel.sourceforge.net/#installation there is reference to
> packages that use this library.
>
> But on the library's home page there is no news since 2009, and the
> mailing list archives seem to no longer exist.
>
> Epson offers this link:
> http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/search/01/search/?OSC=LX. But I
> don't find anything there for Debian or Ubuntu.
>
> Perhaps another manufacturer has their own package that includes
> provision for this function.
>
> Is anyone successfully reporting ink levels (one way or another) for
> any major brand of printer?
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