At home we have a simple Brother DCP-330C printer. It’s an inkjet based printer, has 4 ink cartridges (Black + CYM) and is able to scan a document. All in all a small printer for home usage. Every once in a while my wife wants to print something in gray scale and she starts cursing the color ink cartridges. This weekend we had another episode of this story. It’s Sunday, she wants to print something to use immediately and oh bloody hell, the yellow ink is out. One could think to print in gray scale you wouldn’t need color cartridges… Well not with this device, and it seems a lot of other printers out there have this feature present as well.

The device and next to it the subject of our frustration:

So what do you do when you really need to print, and stores are closed for the next two days? You take the empty cartridge out, you take some tape and start being creative. It seems that a lot of these printers use some optical eye to check through some see-through part in the cartridge whether enough ink is left over. Cover the see-through with some tape and you can fool the printer. It’s probably obvious that you shouldn’t use see-through tape…

After some googling I found someone applying the same workaround. Here is some graphical how to. You can see some black tape being applied to the green highlighted part.

Source: http://forum.gravure-news.com/brother-dcp-330c-refus-d-impression-vt30847.htm

And the original referenced topic: http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/39806 (amazing how long that is)

Thomas, don’t forget to replace that empty cartridge in the end, Vuylsteke