optimized living

Over the weekend I broke out the old college ink jet printer, an HP Deskjet 930C, since I had a couple documents that needed to be printed in color. On my initial test print, both the black and color cartridges were not printing all that great. There were missing lines and just generally poor printing quality. The 930C has the print head built into the cartridge, so I found a couple of “new” cartridges that I’d stored for a while.

I took a “new” black cartridge and a “new” color cartridge that had expired in May of 2003. Never thought too much about the fact that cartridges have an expiration date. I ended up one for two, the black cartridge worked fine but the color cartridge was missing 2 colors. I’m guessing that those colors dried up inside of the cartridge.

Moral of the story: Don’t let really expensive inkjet cartridges expire.