Low ink warning on my ipf8400. Real or not?

[mg73]

I'm trying to use up all the ink on my Canon ipf8400 before moving it.  I've got about 2/3 or more ink in most of the cartridges but suddenly yesterday I got a low in warning on the Gray ink cartrideg.  It's the 2nd cartridge from the right in the right bay.

My question is why should this cartridge have depleated so far ahead of all the others?

I've been printing mostly large Canvas color prints using the Canvas Fine Art Satin setting.

None of my prints were black and white, although one that I printed maybe 3-4 time at 36x40 was monochromatic gray.

Is there a way to check how much ink is still in the cartridge other than relying on the LCD display on the printer and the levels display in the print module?  Can I remove the cartidge and weight it against one of the others?  Will removing some cartidges to weight them and then replacing them screw anything up with the software, chips or ink lines?

[Pete Berry]

In my experience with smaller iPF series printers, gray is generally by far the first to go regardless of your mono/color print mix. Light gray, PM, PC, PK/MK, Y the next. R, G, and B last the longest by a good margin.

No problem with removing carts for weighing, etc. What doesn't work is adding ink to carts by syringe once the "empty cart" message is shown - Ive tried it as an emergency measure, harvesting about 25 ml from used Gray carts.

Pete

[All Thumbs]

Pete is right, grays go fast.  If you want to get an idea of how fast, look at/compare the ink consumption on some of your last prints.  Ink consumption can be found on the front panel, in the job menu> job log> job (number)> ink consumed > color.  I have a 8300 but I assume that this hasn't changed.  By the way, an empty 330ml cart weights about 114G. 
There are a number of other ways to display consumption data but they are dependent on your computer setup.

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