European Parliament: No More Ink-Cartridge Chips

Leon Zandman writes "Electric News reports that the European Parliament voted unanimously on Wednesday in favour of a new EU "electroscrap" recycling law, which comes into effect in 2006 and includes a ruling directing manufacturers of printers to no longer incorporate chips into their own-brand ink refill cartridges. These chips prevent cartridges produced by other manufacturers from being used in many printers. In addition, proponents of the measure say the chips prevent them from being refilled -- a feature on many cartridges made by printer manufacturers. Seems that prices of printer cartridges are going to drop. Let's hope the prices of the printers themselves will not skyrocket..."

Comments

hmm. not sure this is good.

[Cuthalion]

I used write firmware for a company that made high end injet printers and here's what I learned about this there:

1) HP replacement cartridges contain not just ink but also the jets themselves. While this makes the cartridges more expensive it means if you get clogged jets or burned out heaters, (both of which WILL happen) just buy a new cartridge rather than sending your printer off to be repaired (a la Epson). Hell, if you know what you're doing, you can even clean them yourselves, if they're readily acecssible (Which they tend not to be unless they're part of the cartridge, though this obviously isn't necessary)

2) Additionally the circuitry is able to keep track of how much ink is in a cartridge. This allows the cartridge to know its own capacity and allows the software to let you know when it's empty. Depending on how you use your printer it may not matter, but if you're queuing up large print jobs and then leaving it to churn away, it is a benefit to know when you're out of ink, rather than putting stripes vaguely resembling your output on 200 sheets of paper.

3) For high end color printers, if you're actually doing high end stuff ideally the print cartridge should be able to report information about the color profile of the ink in it. An alternative is to have each print cartridge come with a little card that you feed to the printer - that's what my former employer does, but that means you have more parts and more plastic, plus it adds another step to the process which people can screw up.