Inspired by something I read this morning, here’s my own anecdotal experience.

Epson inkjet printers: when it says “Ink Low!” (implying “your dog will DIE if you don’t replace the offending cartridge RIGHT NOW!”

…ignore it.

Modern Epsons (at least – I have no experience with other inkjets) will print merrily along for many more pages before they will finally say “OK: enough is enough – I simply refuse to print any more!” at which point, you replace the cartridge.

Again, YMMV, but with mine, even if it’s half way thru printing an image, it will pause, and present you with the cartridge tray, and let you replace the empty cart with a new one…and then happily resume printing right from where it left off. You’ll never see the difference.

However: the key to this is to NOT go into “replace-the-cartridge-mode” (meaning don’t hit cancel; don’t hit pause; don’t do a thing except replace the cartridge. If you do otherwise, you’ll lose what’s been printed so far, and will have to start over.)

And, as to laser printers, at least with my HP color one: it will start whining early on about how low the toners are. There’s two things to that:

1) there’s a menu selection (buried, of course) that you can use to tell it to quit complaining and just keep printing; and

2) once it starts complaining, (or you see the “low supplies” in the print dialog box) you probably have a ways to go.

I’m at that point now, and I printed out a report on the “remaining consumables” – and it turns out it, each of those “dangerously low” cartridges were fully capable of printing…

…wait for it..

345 -more- pages!

FWIW.