How to Disable Ink Tracking Chip and Ink Monitor

Every Canon printer comes with a built-in ink tracking chip. Its intended purpose is to track how many pages you print and how much ink you use so that it can alert you when the ink is low, and the cartridge needs to be changed. However, this ink tracker can sometimes be a problem if you’re refilling cartridges rather than buying a new one each time. To help you get around this, I’ll review how to disable this ink tracking chip and turn off your Canon printer’s ink monitor.

Let’s start by reviewing the basics of how an ink cartridge works. Every Canon cartridge has a sponge designed to hold onto the ink stored in the cartridge and prevent it from flowing freely out of the printhead. To get you to give them more of your money and buy more of their cartridges, Canon makes their cartridges’ sponges very tiny, so they don’t last very long, and you’ll have to replace them frequently.

In a previous demonstration, I showed you how to replace the tiny default Canon sponge with one of the larger BCH brand ink sponges from my website, BCHTechnologies.com. For a visual demonstration of today’s lesson, feel free to watch this video on my YouTube channel. In this demonstration, we’ll use the cartridge we made in the previous demonstration to see how many pages we can print before running into any problems.

If you insert the cartridge into the printer and the associated LED light comes on with a steady yellow, don’t worry. Despite what the printer thinks, its ink gauge is inaccurate, and your ink levels will be fine when you start out. Canon printers get confused by refilled cartridges, so a steady yellow light means that the printer thinks the ink levels are low.

You’ll get a pop-up window on your computer warning you that the ink levels are low and asking you to cancel the current print job. Don’t do that. You may also find that the printer prints half pages and then restarts. This often happens when the printer’s paper guide is too wide. Make it narrower and ensure the paper is fed in straight down, not crooked.

Test the Cartridge

Now it’s finally time for us to test this cartridge’s capabilities. We had 10mL of ink in the black cartridge in the demonstration and 5mL of each colored ink. It wasn’t long until both cartridges showed a low ink warning message. We had plenty of ink, but the printer didn’t know that. We could still print quite a few pages while the yellow LED light remained steady.

After a while, the LED lights would go from a steady yellow to a flashing yellow, accompanied by another pop-up window. That meant it was finally time to disable the printer’s ink gauge. Canon tells you to hold the stop button for five seconds to continue printing, so go ahead and do that. You’ll also have to do this again later for the colored cartridge. Once the ink counter has been disabled, it will print forever, regardless of how low the ink cartridges are. The LED light will keep flashing yellow, but that’s okay. You can just ignore it.

Soon, we saw that the black parts were starting to print faded, but the colored parts were still printing fine. We stopped the printing and looked through the pages to see where and when the black started to look faded. Then we’ll add 10mL of ink into the black cartridge to get it back to that same print quality. We used a priming syringe to puff out 1mL of air and help it get to the bottom of the cartridge. It then went back to printing good as new.

I hope this blog helped! For more DIY printer tips and tricks, follow me on YouTube at Kevin at BCH. Happy printing!