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Dell Takes the Low Road Regarding Ink Cartridges

Posted by chrisd on from the rev-engineering-to-take-about-five-minutes dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Dell released a line of printers today, manufactured by Lexmark. As covered by by Yahoo they '..contain a chip that disables the cartridge if it is refilled and replaced in a Dell printer..' and 'The cartridges are different sizes than cartridges from other printer vendors, including Lexmark, the spokesperson said. This will limit the amount of knockoff cartridges available, but only until someone figures out how to reverse engineer Dell's cartridges.'" In the interest of full disclosure, note that the poster sells knockoff carts.

2 of 426 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The Low Road? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, yeah. And it isn't even *slightly* deceptive to drop the cost of the lead in product and then force the purchase of specific stuff later. Not at ALL. Its not necessarily a 'low road', but anyone who calls it even remotely 'high road-ish' is talking out of their distended ass.

  2. a thought... by NOLAChief · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My dad ran a laser printer cartridge recharge/refurbish business for a while several years ago. IIRC, a lot of printer manufacturers would also collect these old cartridges to do the same and resell them as used. What's preventing Dell/Lexmark/whoever from doing something like this? There's obviously a market for it, they'd save on manufacturing costs and empty cartridges would stay out of the landfills for a while.