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Ink Cartridges with Built-In Self-Destruct Dates
Linker3000 writes "The Inquirer has an article about HP ink cartridges having a built-in expiry date that can cause them to become unusable even if they aren't empty! Another twist on the 'chipped cartridge' stories--and also another kick in the teeth (and wallet) for the consumer methinks." This isn't really a new problem - here's a good piece about the problem.
I don't have this problem, I'm still using a dot matrix from 1993! I have only replaced the ribbon once, and it still prints. (really light and grey/bluish)
If you don't like it, buy someone else's product.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Cheers for taking the company that used to create those really good laser printers and turning them into another crap marketing company, just like you did to Digital.
Why is it that mergers seem to take the worst bits of both companies?
That Lexmark are using DMCA against a company that sells chips that allow third-party cartridges to be used...
This just adds to a list of reasons why I will never, ever, own a printer again...
Join the Free Software Foundation
With cars, it's illegal to do this (Brady law I think). Why is any other hardware different? Car makers tried to get the monopoly on parts, and then got slapped down by laws to keep them from doing this. Can that be used as a precedent to prevent this?
What about those that let their ink sit in their printer for years and don't care about quality? Or those that put in a cartridge that been in storage for years and the print quality is just fine?
I know what I'd do. I'd go down the shop and buy a new one. Then I'd return the old one with the receipt and explain that it's defective - full of ink but not working.
Since I'm not a subscriber (I know, I'm a llama), I get ads in the stories. The ad for this story is for an HP handheld device.
The tagline?
HP- Invent
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
The article says that the expiration date is 4 1/2 years after the cartridge is put into the printer. Surely, more than 99.9% of users will run out of ink well before the expiration date.
The RIAA has successfully sued a man for $197,000,000 for illegally humming a copyrighted recording...
so you get 4 and a half years to use the cartidge after you buy the thing. if the ink hasn't dryed up by the time you get around to using it, the quality is going to be shit. expecally with those ultra high end ink jets from hp where you continually expect outstanding quality.
Ahh.. The mind what a wonderful trap!
5...
"err... does anyone know how to change ink cartridges? Please"
4...
"Ok don't panic. It's probably under this cover somewhere"
3...
"shit, only 3 seconds to find the bloody thing. Why oh why didn't I read the user manual?"
2...
"Aha - that looks like it"
1...
"Just about got it out..."
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP POP
"eeewwwwhh"
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
prevent this. A vendor can't sell after-market printer
ink cartridges for some products as they would be in
violation of the DMCA -- hence restraint of free trade,
not the original intent of the DMCA. This only serves
to keep prices higher and harms consumers, again not
the intent of the DMCA.
Can you purchase after-market products, new seats,
new engines, new spark plugs, new oil and gas for
your car? Imagine if GM did the following:
network, all using encryption (seats, radio, engine)
the car to start unless you had all the original parts
parts from them
up engines, no customized or replacement seats,
no super stereo).
What's to prevent them from doing that?
I learned a good while back (I think as long as 7-8 years ago) NOT to stockpile HP printer ink cartriges. I used to buy 1 color and 1 black cart at a time, but I found that the carts I bought and let sit on the shelf until I needed them often would not work if they had been on the shelf for a few months or so.
I appreciate HP's support of Linux and would like to support them, but I stopped buying their printers a few years ago. There's just too many little quirks. The last one I had ran the paper through at a slight angle. I don't think I've seen an HP printer I felt I really trusted since the original Deskjet and Deskjet 500.
Hal
No customer likes surprises, especially after they purchased a high-end product. If HP or another manufacturer implements a policy such as this one, there should be full disclosure so at least people are aware of it. Plus, HP has the resources to research not only the financial aspects of such a plan, but also the impact on customer loyalty, etc.
On a different note, I'd like to see a mechanism put in place to allow customers to "re-charge" their current cartridges - like a photocopier card - rather than sending them to the landfill only to be replaced by the exact same product.
They violate the buyer's-obligation-law, which forces you to buy consumables supplies for printers, even when you don't need them. So, wtf should we care about them?
I'd like to see a consumers' group sue their arse off for this.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
I bought a Cannon inkjet recently precisely because they don't screw me for refills. There are no chips, prices for official cartridges are reasonable, and there is a large selection of 3rd party inks. Better yet there is one refill per colour so if I run out of cyan, I don't have to throw out my magenta, yellow or black.
Of course, the printers are a bit more, but if you're doing a lot of printing, they're cheaper in the long run.
Ah those old printers. I remeber I think I had a 2650 which took about 5 minute to print a page a letter quality. THe bumps of the back were a good replacement for brail
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
It is not a free market, thanks to the DMCA. Without the DMCA, we'd have the freedom to hack and bypass these limits.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Adverts at the top of the Comment Page. 3/5 for HP print cartriages :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
"With cars, it's illegal to do this (Brady law I think)."
Does the Brady Law on cars mean that there is a 3-day waiting period if you want to buy a Chevy Beretta?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
There are a few companies in Taiwan and China that are working on Point of Sale ink jet printers. These printers tend to cost a bit more than a typical home printer but they must be cheap to operate or the merchants won't buy them. That's why you still see so many old 9 pin impact printers out there in cash registers. The problem is merchants want full color for receipts but they aren't going to pay much for it so it has to use cheap paper and cheap ink and still look good.
Once the POS market starts to take off again, these guys are going to ramp up their production and then its a matter of time before there is competition with larger bits of paper.
Remember Epson started out selling receipt printers and then went and undercut Centronics by a 1/3. I gives these guys about two years and the HP/Epson/Lexmark ink jet cartridge business will be dead.
Not stored in the printer...
"As the corporate sys admin points out, organisations like his buy cartridges in quantity for discounts, with unused ones being stored."
Retard.
Buy from someone else.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I've had Canon printers before; very bad products. The paper feed would always take at least 3 pages through and jam. The inkjet cartridges seem to last about 5 pages.... no problem with expiry there, if you have to replace them so much. Everyone I know who has had Canon printers has had the same problem.
(Canon's other products are great though. It is like HP: the printers work nicely, but their PC's do not)
worth of ink. that's quite typical, in to daze 'economIE', or is it econoME?
lookout bullow. run for your phonIE payper liesense options, should you have any left? the dark daze of the Godless greed/fear based softwar gangsters is deepending into coolapps.
the creator is participating, act like you understand what that means, & we might, even yet, come out of this cesspool of deception, to be ok.
"That's a new way of making money. But only short term. We bought the cartridge because we needed the printer to work". But, he added, after he reported this to his boss, the firm has decided to buy Lexmark printers in the future.
Which pretty much shows you where greedy short-sighted "they're just stupid customers" corporate America is headed.
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
Insightful?
1) HP bought Compaq.
2) Last Year.
3) The print cartridge was manufactured 4.5 years ago.
Synergy is your friend
Of course it is a scandal, however in practice it won't make much difference since HP ink cartridges have always become unusable when not used for too long: they dry out.
I print only very occasionally, maybe a few pages per week or month, sometimes not at all for 1 or 2 months. I was tired to throwing away 90% filled but dry ink cartidges and therefore switched to a laser printer. They work even if you print a page after months without use.
This means that you effectively can't refill these ink cartridges.
This points out the classic battle between free beer and free speech. Well, maybe it doesn't. But it still sucks.
they come with serial numbers.
Hell, even the organic celery in the local supermarket have their own serials. How far will this madness go?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
We've all heard and experienced horror stories with ink jet printing.
But is there anyone selling a decent printer now that lets you refill the cartridges, a printer that's reliable, at a fair price?
I'm not talking about a printer that can compete on price with the subsized prices that the ones with the expensive cartridges go for -- just a printer that's priced fairly, and cartridges that are refillable without going broke.
Even a suggestion for old models to look for on ebay would be helpful.
Expensive arrays from compaq and Sun have batteries that "expire" after two years. Wether or not they should. The batteries are cache batteries and once they hit the date they send alarms constantly. Do they really need changing? do you want to take a chance?
As always, YMMV.
comment directly in my journal
Grabbed a cartridge from the storage room, as the one that was in there seemed to be out.
Funny, it wasn't printing yellow. Ran some cleaning routines, still no luck.
Then grabbed another cartridge.
IT wasn't printing cyan.
Then another cartridge.
5 cartridges later, I got one that was printing all three colors correctly. Expiry date was Nov 2000.
I didn't get any error messages about expiration dates on the computer, but seriously, these printer cartridges were sealed. They shouldn't be malfunctioning right out of the box.
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
How can you draw a meaningful comparison about Canon based on one printer that you owned a long time ago?
Think about it.
And Yamaha turned around and sued this same guy because his "hum" bore a strong similarity to the Kazoo sound patch which Yamaha sells as part of its XG music synthesizer system.
Will my printer begin to sing "Daisy" as I take a screwdriver to the cartridge?
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
For those of you who aren't familiar with business practices, HP is following the Gillette business model in their printer division.
This was thought up by Mr. Gillette himself (you know, the razor guy). He would sell razors at a loss, and then sell the refills at much inflated prices to make up the difference. Even today, a pack of 8 or so refills for a Gillette razor equals the price of just buying a new one.
HP is trying to pull this off in the computer world, and I don't know if it's such a wise thing to pinch your customers until they bleed dollars. Look at recent history:
1. HP inkjet carts used to be freely refillable, until HP modified the design to keep this from happenning.
2. HP printers generally stopped accepting third-party cartridge replacements.
3. Now the HP-only cartridges have a expiration date.
Now, since the first two steps haven't gotten the average printer user keeping up with ink cartridge consumption to keep the stock-holders happy; I guess just make the things stop working after a while! Perfect business plan, guys.
I really would love to see large companies use the good-ol sense of customer service to make a buck than bend-the-customer-over-because-we-can.
I know I'm not buying anymore HP stuff from now on.
-brain
DDJ had an article about this sort of thing (I think thats the one, pay-to-read). It was the same thing with a HP 2000C. The biggest problem arose when one was trying to refill a cartridge and, of course, the cartridge would plainly deny it had any ink. Stupid - and low too.
Brother HL-1440 keeps track of the paper count. At 20K pages you have to change the drum. To reset the counter, turn printer on, open the printer's front door, and with the door open press the (black) button below the led (3) lights. Page count resets to zero.
I'm not sure if this is sufficient to fool the machine into thinking that the drum has been replaced since I'm only up to 8K pages.
Why should you care if you might ask? Because the drum is $40-$50 dollars less than a brand new printer, and the counter is quantitative rather than qualitative (empty page going through = 100% filled page going through).
Great quality, fast, cheap refills. Or even better, a cheap laser printer, and use a service for your photo printing. I have never owned a printer, imagine that.
I bought a pizza from this new pizza place in town. They use a chemical in the pizza that causes the cheese to evaporate once it gets below 90F in temperature. No more leftovers the next day and so you have to order from them again if you want more pizza.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Have you ever retired a human by mistake? or Its too bad she won't live. But then again who does?
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
I already get to hack my PC, Tivo, Mobile Phone, Games Consoles and now I get the opportunity to tinker with my Printer.
*Rushes off to bag himself the www.printer-modchips.com domain*
straight to the gates of anihilation.
stay tuned, the rest of the wwworld is pleading yOUR case for survival right now. as use-you-all, y'all don't need to know anything, about anything.
ripping peepoles off on ink cartirdges, will be known as a parlor trick, compared to the big bullast.
I noticed hp actually fixed this problem. All the new consumer inkjets I've seen use this tiny cartridges (good for about 10 pages at first glance). They are cheaper than the 45s and 78s I am currently using but with much less life. Ink dryed out? No problem. You already used half of it printing the alignment page.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
The design engineer has already been fired. The new one is busily designing fiendishly clever ways of making you run an ink cycle ever time you turn your printer on and wondering what how much ink he can empty out of your cartridge ever time you do so.
But the cartridges expired in more like 9 months to a year. The kicker was that I never printed many things using color. HOWEVER, if after several months the color cartridge decided that it had expired, the printer wouldn't let you print in plain black ink unless you changed the color cartridge. So even if you never want to use color, you still have to replace the color cartridge once a year in order to print black ink only pages. What a racket.
That's a good question, though I'd take the more generic approach: It seems like today the major printer manufacturers are doing all they can to screw you on ink prices. Surely someone has already done the research for what printer manufacturers *don't* suck; which ones specifically design their printers to make it easy to refill their cartridges, etc... anyone wanna suggest one? ;)
Which printer brands is recommended?
That won't have these impairment chips. And happily accepts third party refills or replacements.
And work with Linux/*BSD..
PS, now I know what to do next time there is too much time.. hack some hp smart chips & firmware..
Bought myself a S900 a while back, after doing some serious research. Has fantastic print quality, well built, looks good and as mentioned previously it uses single colour carts I can pick up for about £3 ($5) a pop. The printer wasn't cheap but worth the money.
Hey, the Milk I buy must have that same chip.
My Rio has this problem of draining the battery if I leave it in so a new battery will go dead after a couple weeks even if I don't use it. Maybe you could design a printer with a really big ink well and a cartridge that would slowly leak into it while not in use. Then people would either have to remove the cartridge between use and store it upside down or replace it every couple of weeks.
Gee, I really should start my own business with all of this innovative thinking.
This is probably driver related. Just use another driver not from HP. If there is one for your OS that is.
Epson Stylus C42 $99 CDN KO-REC-Type Black Cartridge $15 CDN KO-REC-Type Color Cartridge $19 CDN I sell these out of my store, and I get no complaints.
Where I post game reviews, my PSP backgrounds, podca
Do as I do, avoid printing at all cost and work on implementing the paperless office.
Interesting. I switched to an HP printer from using Epson products because it was a lot easier to change the printer cartridges and to reuse them. With an Epson, if you don't use it constantly, the heads dry and clog. Since with the new models, you can't get the cartridge to eject until it's empty. And seeing as they can't empty because they're clogged, the printer becomes a useless piece of $100 junk.
With the HP's, I can pull the cartridge, clean the head and put it back in again.
Well, now if the HP cartridge is going to expire long before I use it enough to empty it, that means that the HP printers will be relegated to the same closet as my Epson printers.
That means I'll be buying Lexmark, I guess.
Though, shouldn't we be applauding HP for making such an inroad to pushing American businesses towards the paperless office?
Whew! This water sure is cold!
A Beretta is a long-since-defunct Chevy sedan, not an SUV. I can't think of any other vehicles named after firearms.... Dodge Magnum maybe? Unless that one is named after Tom Selleck instead.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
No.
/.
:D But seriously my friend had one of the new model HP printers, prints photo quality (if you use a whole cartridge printing it), and he has a refill kit for it...
Printers are the piece of hardware that fails the most out of any damn computer equipment since vaccumn tubes!
That is why I:
#1 refuse to buy one
#2 abuse the hell out of my roommates and works printers
#3 trash them on
I think it lasted 5 months or somewhere near that
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
The cost of a ink cartridge is 90%+ of the cost of owning and maintaining a inkjet printer. The battery in an array from sun/compaq is much less than 1% of the cost.
Plus my bet is you'd put up with the cost of replacing cache batteries instead of losing whatever the battery is there to protect (transactions and such).
If you only need to print in black and white, you will likely be much better off with a laser printer anyway (i.e. better, faster, cheaper!). I did a quick calculation on my DeskJet 6xx series ink cartridge versus an HP LaserJet 1200 toner unit. The ink cartridge capacity is disappointing.
laserjet: $100 / 3000 pages = $0.03 / page
hp inkjet: $40 / 650 pages = $0.06 / page
Pretty much all laser printers result in a lower cost per page than inkjet. Do a calculation with how many pages you print a year, and you may find that the laser pays for itself very quickly.
Will the cartridge also be tied to the printer you initialized it in as well, or could you at least move it to another printer.. As long as your 30 day printing allocation hadn't been exceeded..
For home users this will be totally nuts.. cartridges may last 6 months at home..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If morons make the wrong decisions, it is still a free market. That does not change it one bit. Other factors can make it less free, but individuals making dumb decisions is not one of these factors.
Those of us who think occasionally were horrified at the idea that software and movies could be licensed rather than sold. You purchase the product, and should be allowed to have your own quiet enjoyment of the product, but the law doesn't allow this.
Now that computers are about to be in EVERYTHING, expect EVERYTHING you buy to be licensed rather than sold. Expect to start paying a license to drive your car, to keep your tires inflated, etc. Not yet, but it won't be long, I assure you.
Even worse, expect the same monopoly conditions that prevail in the software industry to prevail everywhere else, too.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Panasonic KX-P2123 Quiet (ok so its not that quiet) 24 pin dot matrix. Prints all the courier code i throw at it and even prints the occasional document (OO.org text). Supported by all operating systems known to man, woman or geek.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Canon is quite good, no chips, etc. Well at least on the printers that use seperate CMYK ink wells.
They do however state that if you use non genuine inks the warranty is void. But this isn't necessarily true depending on local consumer protection laws.
But besides the legalese, there are no other hinderences.
OK, I'll buy that. So why go to the expense of including an expiration chip in it then? Think about this for a second.
This also begs this question - Have they been testing this technology since 1999? Not likely. It is most likely a programmable chip. So maybe in the next batch of cartridges, they can change the expiration date to 6 months, and make it behave like it just ran out of ink. The end user will just think they ran out, and buy another cartridge.
I used to think I was a little paranoid, but then the DMCA gets passed, and greedy f'ing companies try to pull this kind of crap, and I think maybe I wasn't paranoid enough.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
to get us to throw out our ink-jet printers and upgrade to real laser printers. It's easier for the industry to sell things in larger chunks of money, so a $400 laser printer and a couple of $50 toner carts looks better than 4 $100 ink-jets and a handful of $30 carts.
big evil businesses always find a way to stay afloat.
Usuaullly they start out with a good in demand product
and then a few years later with a saturated market
they come up with a subscription model.
You know... to stay profitable and make share
holders happy.
I think Gillette razors have there own 3 day clock
which starts ticking once water hits them.
How pathetically short are these razors' lives? Anyone?
Pretty soon HP will just charge for every page you print.
-J
Are the Hp and Lexmark printers being sold over in Europe different? Without the U.S. DMCA encoded chips in the cartidges? Can you by aftermarkert or third party cartridges over there and they work?
Does the ink actually last 4 and a half years? After that point, is the print quality noticable worse? If so, it could be that the companies are trying to limit bad prints coming out of thier printers and hurting thier image just because some people print one page per year.
Just so I don't get flamed, I will add that it should be legal to hack the stuff to get it to work anyways.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
I totally agree with you. However, I'm not sure that the recent disappointment with HP will go away for those purchasing a laser printer.
I bought a HP laser printer with my last computer, largely because where I work I had become impressed with the number of old HP laser printers that would still reliably print high quality copies.
After buying my HP laser printer, however, I've become incredibly disappointed.
Don't get me wrong--I still am glad I bought a laser printer and not an inkjet. But I am astounded at how much of a messed-up printer I bought. I cannot believe that HP would design this printer and let it go through tests and not catch all of its problems. It misfeeds at angles, grabs multiple sheets at a time, and doesn't always respond to cancel print requests. Most of the time, unless you're guiding the paper into the feeder manually, you're taking a risk of something going wrong.
I know I'm not alone in my problems, and that I didn't buy a lemon, because I have since met many other people who have had similar problems and purchased other printers. One of these individuals told me they know a printer expert who told them the model was messed up, and not to buy another one in that line.
Perhaps these problems were just a fluke or bad experiment, limited to one model. However, I've heard a lot about HP in recent years that makes me incredibly skeptical to buy another printer from them. I might, but I'm going to do a hell of a lot of research beforehand.
I get the impression that, in general, somewhere along the line, HP stopped being the same company they once were. Maybe that's changing again, but I'm not completely convinced.
I bought my HP inkjet printer in '97 before they decided to include any of these "features".
It came with two cartridges. A black ink, and a color ink cartridge. I've only had to replace one of them since I bought the printer, and that cartidge was about $30.
True, I don't print much, and $30 for a cartridge is a rip-off. But I feel I'm being ripped-off much less than people with more recent models, so I'm relatively happy.
Woo hoo! I'm being ripped-off less than others!
My epson Stylus C60 has a chip on each cartridge. I've pried them off before (after the cartridge is empty of course), and they're not connected to the inside of the cartridge that I could see, so I suspect there just there to authenticate themselves as being Geniune Epson (R) cartridges.
A few people predictably complained that their 'rights' were being violated by this, but I think the general agreement was that this measure cut down on support calls to AMD by idiots who didn't know what they were doing and broke the chips.
I think this is at least partially the same situation. These inkjet refill kits became very popular to the most average of computer users, and I can only imagine the amount of customer support calls that came to HP as a result of people improperly using these kits and breaking their printers/ink cartridges.
Now we all understand how HP makes lots of $$$ for their cartridges, so lets look past that. HP sells a lot of printers and cartridges to a lot of (dumb) people. Should HP have to waste all that tech support time on problems not caused by their product?
While the slim minority (but a vocal presence here on /.) complain that this violates their perceived right to use third-party hardware in their printers, I think this was a smart way for HP to reduce calls by idiot users, just like AMD was.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
And I'm going to completely blow the competition out of the water with my ground-breaking business plan:
I'm a genius!
One way or another, the consumer has to pay for the real cost of the printer, which includes the cost of R&D. There are two ways: upfront, or indirect. Now, you can ask consumers: would you rather pay $499 for the printer and get ink for free, or would you rather pay $99 for the printer and pay for expensive ink? The market chose the second option some years back, which is partly why HP took so much of the inkjet printer market from its competitors.
Now, having established that consumers prefer (and have chosen) to pay for the ink, HP is entitled to protect its ink sales. This just seems logical.
Look at it another way: paying for the consumables gives consumers much more freedom. If they don't like the printer, they chuck it. If you buy a more expensive laser printer that runs on cheap toner, you'll save money, but only if you run the beast for three years.
This is not a printer market problem. Do you buy regular lightbulbs or 'ecological long life' ones? Do you pay for your train and bus each time you get on, or do you buy a season ticket? Do you rent an appartment or pay a mortgage?
This really is a matter of the free market. If printer R&D costs were negligible, we would have already seen an invasion of cheap printers along with cheap ink. Look at what happened to scanners. There is no ripoff here, only people unhappy with the bargains they made.
This story keeps coming back to Slashdot, and every time it's "the poor consumer being ripped off by those bastard printer manufacturers." Does no-one actually bother to analyze the economics here?
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
There are some sites out there that sell the chips for these cartridges and provide instructions on how to remove your chip and replace it with the new one. A drag I know and something you shouldn't have to do, but if you have seen the price of some of the toner cartridges you can understand why people would bother doing it. And the chips are only $7.50
First, printers and particularly inkjet printers, follow the Gillette 'sell razor blades, not razors' marketing model. They practicaly give you the printer as an ink burner. So they do all kinds of nifty stuff to make sure you have things to burn ink on, and you keep running down to CompUSA to plop down another $50 on an ink cartridge. The printer also comes with lots of nifty printing software to give you reasons to burn ink.
In our printers, the cartridge was intelligent, and would keep count (yes, the cartridge did) of the number of individual dots of ink for each color of ink emitted. Knowing the average dot capacity of the cartridge (for each color), we could predict when the cartridge was running low and (kindly) tell the user to go buy another cartridge, and would even provide a handy hyperlink to our online store. Better, we would track the printer's average dots/page and page/day statistics to tell them they had x days of printing left. Buy now!
So this comes to me as no surprise that they have put an expiration date on the printer cartridge. They will due it under the guise that its ensuring 'fresh ink supply' and to ensure 'highest quality printing'. But, in reality, its only another means to force the customer into buying yet more ink. Cha-ching!
My advice, shitcan the inkjet printer, go buy a good laser printer. The total cost-of-ownership is much less in the long run.
p.s. - giving the inkjet away is evil and rude and only perpetuates the problem.
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
not because of thoughtful capitalism. there is just no technical measure possible to prevent a car battery from draining and the gasoline from evaporating.
see, you're talking bull again, since the car can start, albeit with a small chance, but it has no master switch that prevents me from trying so. if the car would count the idle days and then forcefully requiring me to do some service without even trying if it maybe still working - I would call it a typical consumer fraud.
oh, and btw, once I've got my car sitting in the garage for 6 months, full of gasoline, battery not disconnected (because of lazyness) and it started like a charm. with no problems or retrying, it started on the first ignition turn. oh yes, and that car was already 9 years old then.
call it luck, lazyness, lower standards or what-have-you, I want to use my equipment the way I like to, as long as I'm not violating others security or hurting the environment and
I want to retain the right to print out shitty quality because I use a 5 year old cartridge
(think of drafts and throwaway WYSIWY*N*G-printing) and i want to retain the right to flatten my car's battery in a futile attempt to save the work of proper preparation for long term car storage. my printer manufacturer can suggest me proper usage for maximum quality and my car manufacturer can can suggest me how to store my car properly when I can't drive for x months because I've got a broken limb but when they force it upon me, I'm gonna hurl.
Exactly. The intrusive presence of government, in the form of the DMCA, makes the market less free.
You crazy /.'ers, always bitching about printers...
Lets do some math here:
Ink cart, Black - $30
Ink cart, Color - $30
Printer (after rebate, laptop purchase, whatever) - Free to $60
Do you REALLY think something that can precicely paint 1200 dots to an inch (That's roughly _115_ million dots on a full color page), in less than 4 minutes costs the company NOTHING to produce, package, advertise, ship and GIVE to you?
If you think so, take my advice and don't go into business.
All of the manufacturers are selling their 'low-end' printers at a loss and expecting to make it up in ink sales. If you decide you don't like that, go FIND a cheap, good, printer with cheap refillable ink...go ahead. What? you can't find one? Why do you think that is?
Pay for it up front or pay for it in installments. Any company that successfully stays in business will get your money in one of those two ways and STAY in business.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Canon is the way to go. Separate ink tanks for each color and no electronics in the tank at all. Actually, the tanks are clear, so you can even see the ink level for yourself.
I can tell you that article only hits the tip of the iceberg. There are far more nefarious things happening in the latest crop of inkjets coming to market. More and more is being done in the printer firmware and the ink tank chips to try and prevent people from bypassing it.
Just because your printer tells you it's out of ink, does not mean it's necessarilly so.
And no, I don't like it one bit...
> They violate the buyer's-obligation-law
> wtf should we care about them?
What the hell are you talking about? Are you stupid or just a troll? Or flamebait like this...:(
"damnit, it does change the model completely. if you do not have rational, informed consumers, then you have a breakdown of the market."
Not at all. A free market means that individuals have the freedom to make the decisions they want to; regardless of if someone else has the opinion that they are uninformed, morons, or doing the wrong thing.
The "The market has failed because people are not doing what I think they should do" argument does not cut it.
Using a combination of an RF tag and a specially constructed oil drain plug, in a few years, motor oil will have an absolute expiration date of 3500 miles.
How it works: Motor oil sold in the future will require the purchase of a special oil plug with an embedded chip and electronic valve. New cars from the factory starting in 2006 will come equipped with this special plug already installed.
Anyway, when you purchase new motor oil, you will be required to stick a special RF tag that will come with the bottle somewhere inside your engine compartment (within 8 feet of the oil drain plug).
The plug recognizes the new RF tag ID number and records the current milage and date. As soon as the car hits 3500 miles or 2 years without changing the oil (and getting a new RF tag), the drain plug valve opens and drains the oil all over the ground and emits a loud beeping noise.
Then you can choose to drive you car for another mile or two until the engine seizes up, or as the oil companies are hoping, you'll pull over and cease to use the car until you can change the oil.
We have already patented this, and the way the plug detects the milage is secret. We expect the rollout to begin around the end of 2007.
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
*sigh* Another company waging an escalating war against its own customers, in a vain attempt to control equipment which is not its property. (You *sold* it, guys! Learn to let go.)
All the millions that they're pouring into ever-less-usable cartridge technology could have been used to *cut prices until refilled cartridges aren't so attractive*.
Or they could cut the price *way* down and *lease* the cartridge. It remains HP's property so they have control over its fate, and they can develop cart.s which are *designed* to be remanufacturable in order to keep prices low. Customer gets lower price, HP doesn't have to deal with the results of jimmied cart.s -- both sides win. Maybe the cart. manufacturing, or at least REmanufacturing, can be jobbed out to the current refillers under contract laying out strict QC rules -- *everybody* wins.
Hey, easy! This one should have been a joke.
There are plenty of free lunches, but that is beside the point.
The whole rebate thing is a scam. They often sit for weeks on the money, doing who knows what with it (instead of refunding the rebate as soon as they get the application; nothing hard about that).
They also have a mess of paperwork and date restrictions to make it harder, and on top of that, a large % of buyers outright forget to do the rebate.
So, they are getting more money on the printers than you think.
Time to get rid of the rebate scam and require all rebates to be paid at the time of purchase; there is no reason why not.
"If you decide you don't like that, go FIND a cheap, good, printer with cheap refillable ink...go ahead. What? you can't find one? Why do you think that is?"
Why? Overly high taxes and regulation on business (thank you government) that make it hard to start up and compete. The DMCA and frivolous lawsuits on dubious "patents" to keep others out.
Definately not the same. You can reset the battery age if you want to without replacing the battery. on A1000/A3x000 run '/usr/lib/osa/bin/raidutil -c -R' T3/T3+ telnet into T3 and run '.bat -n u(x)pcu(y)' Yes that's a period in front of bat and replace x and y.
I had an Epson printer that was like this. IT would run "out" of ink according to the software. I would take the cartridge out, put it back in, and use it as a "new" cartridge for another six months. I'm assuming the driver had a built-in usage monitor of some type.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
The reason for all the ink cartridge price fixing is due to the fact that the printer companies want to have enough money saved up to defend themselves in court when the MPAA sues them for providing "devices which can be used for the piracy of a single frame of copyrighted motion picture material".
Damn HP and their cirrcumvention devices.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Try to get one of those old 600dpi HP laserprinters like the HP LaserJet 4. These are often available used for $70 or less (often with 12000 or less total pages printed in the lifespan). These printers are ultra reliable. Toner cartridges are inexpensive (Good refilled ones can be bought for $20). These printers should work with almost any OS.
Let the games begin!
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Remember, unlike the /. community, the general population is a bunch of dummies when it comes to tech (not their fault, just a fact). They will complain that their print quality is low.
Photographers, artists, etc. demand proper color quality and go to great lengths to achieve it. Putting an expiration date on the ink is actually a good thing. Not allowing it to be overridden is a bad thing.
Like meat, does it magically change into death ridden, bug infested slime the day after the "Sell By" date? I don't think so, but it should make you start to think about using it soon.
> Thanks to the DMCA, we are powerless to do anything to prevent this.
How about buying a printer from a different manufacturer?
> Imagine if GM did the following: ... Enforced the DMCA so you could only buy replacement parts from them ...
Yeah, and I'm sure all the Japanese manufacturers would sit back and ignore this enormous marketing opportunity.
It's still a free (as in cancer) country.
I read that as...
The RIAA has successfully sued a man for $197,000,000 for allegedly humming a copyrighted recording...
How's that for a Freudian slip? RIAA, even my subconcious thinks you suck!
Honestly-- the witch hunts!
The ink has many chemicals in it, many that don't want to stick together. The lighter elements in the ink tend to evaporate, turning the ink into a thick sludge. The sludge, as you can imagine, has a hard time passing through the nozzles of the print head. This has always has been issue since at least 1996, when we got our first high-end inkjet printers. At that time, you could expect the shelf life of the cart. to be about 6-10 months. In fact, back in those days, stores would occasionally sell you old stock, and there were no date codes printed on the ink carts. You were SOL if you got an "old stock" cart, because HP said it was too old. At least now HP will warrany ANY non-empty ink cart that has a date stamp before the expiry date on the cart.
Think about it-- faster evaporation times on paper mean the ink doesn't soak the paper as much. You can get brigher brights, darker darks, etc. These chemicals in the ink don't magically want to evaporate only once they hit the paper. They always want to evaporate. Remember the $800 inkjet from not so long ago that had a halogen heater? It was to speed up the chemical reaction.
I could understand if the date codes started inching closer and closer-- to like just a month or two weeks. (Keep the ink in the freezer next to the t-bones, anyone? yeah, right)
I don't believe the ink has been engineered to have a shelf-life. It may be that they're in no hurry to improve their shelf-life, but it is nothing new. The date code is to help prevent customers from getting old stock. There may be better alternatives to this kind ink out now, but they're building on their ink research from 10 years ago.. which means it is probably also the cheapest technology. So if you want to claim that for the last decade, HP has been plotting this scheme to get more ink dollars out of people, we'd better put on our tinfoil hats.
Now, having established that consumers prefer (and have chosen) to pay for the ink, HP is entitled to protect its ink sales. This just seems logical.
It is however not legal. In the US we have anti-bundling laws. That is, you cannot make purchase of one thing contingent upon another. This is to prevent strange pricing scams.
But you say, ho, did you notice Gilette's Sensor and Mach III razors where the razor is virtually free and the blades are expensive? This is indeed a perfect example. There are aftermarket Sensor-compatible blades (I don't know why there are not Mach III ones).
So Gilette is free to embark upon their plan of charging you for the razor by pricing it into the blades, but they have no legal way to protect it. They have to hope the consumer follows along. And the consumer did, the Sensor was a success, people bought the on-brand blade cartridges either because of their better distribution or because people preferred a safer, more familiar produt. Enough people did so to make Gilette a lot of money.
Requiring the purchase of future replacement parts with a product makes it impossible to the customer to determine the true cost of a product. And is why this monopoly on cartridges must end.
I still have my HP Deskjet 500C that i bought in 1991 for $800....one of the first color deskjets HP ever made. The color printing on it no longer works but the black text only printing(which is all I ever do)- works great. The cartridges can be bought on the cheap off of the net from refiller companies(i dont really care if they are low quality as ive gotten the value out of this printer years ago). As for these new printers and these new features? I plan on buying a non-hp brand of printers whenever this old one I have gives out. My parents bought an 882C and a new 2500C recently. They both were crap- the extra 'features' the software contain, most of the time, cause it to have spooling errors, etc etc. And now- expiration dates on carts? BS. I'll switch to Epson or Canon. HP/Compaq needs to get their heads in gear and realize that they got to where they currently are by making quality, supported, products(well, at least thats the case for the HP side of the company).
Epson, Lexmark, HP, et al aren't chickens ripe for the plucking. I think you severely underestimate the current level of competition in inkjets. The business is already so cutthroat that I don't think the entry of another company is going to revolutionize the business. I mean, how much are inkjets going to cost after this? $0? That'll never happen because it would destroy the market for ink cartridges. What sucker would buy a replacement cartridge when you can get a new printer for free including cartridges?
Canon.
For every printer in their line, they sell the print head and ink tank seperately--which means that they can design the print head to be a higher-quality system that will last longer than one ink tank's worth.
Apparantly their printers are a _bit_ pricier than HP's--but that's only for the basic printer. Price out the ink and printer for a year, and they're a lot closer in price.
Under a proposed EU law (WEEE directive), this would be illegal -- manufacturers are specifically forbidden to comporomise the recyclability of products. Protecting the environment is more important than protecting corporate profits.
.....
Under UK law, it's already illegal. If I have bought an ink cartridge, I own that cartridge and I have the right to use, abuse, enjoy or destroy it. If the manufacturers, or anyone for that matter, do something to it to prevent me using it, then that is criminal damage. No need even to call a solicitor, since it's a criminal act you should just be able to dial 999
Changing the subject slightly now. Me and a mate fished an Apple ImageWriter out of a skip. We found a power lead, cobbled up a serial cable and got the thing to print. Bit faint, but we got a new ribbon (purple!) and wound it into the cassette (it split open easily enough and the old ribbon was unlikely to stain much). No manual, though. So I found an ImageWriter II driver for the Amiga, stuck my faithful Citizen 120D [now that really was an excellent printer!] into Hex Dump mode, and rattled off a document with various text effects in it. Even managed to suss out bit image mode, and in the end we used the printer to print forged bus tickets. We must have had the best part of £2000 worth of free travel. We had to stop doing it when the bus company changed all their ticket machines, but the printer does still print, if a bit faintly.
Perhaps we should start a new forum for Printers We Have Known and Loved?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
This is not a good comparison, at least for Sun hardware. Taking the Sun A1000 disk array as an example, the cache backup battery is intended to be replaced after two years in use. However this does not mean that the battery fails after two years, just that this is the interval that Sun suggests to minimise unintended downtime.
/usr/lib/osa/raidutil command can display the current age of the battery in use on an array, and can also reset the remaining battery lifetime back to two years. In practice the battery in an A1000 should last for four years. If your data/service is not critical you may feel that it is more cost effective to simply reset the battery life after two years and replace it when it actually fails.
:-)
The
A1000's sometimes come up on ebay, and would make a great mp3 store. You may not feel that maximum reliability is that important at home
Steve
because they made some fantastic equipment. The HP 200CD Sine Wave Oscillator, 400D Vacuum Tube Voltmeter, HP3577 Network Analyzer, HP3585 Spectrum Analyzer and HP7475 Plotter were all superb instruments I used daily for years. I still have a working HP-15C calculator I cherish.
But lately, HP has been taken over by sleazy MBAs. It's a sad end. Now they're trying to out-sleaze Lexmark.
Free Market? Yeah, right.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I bought a lead pipe for my plumbing from Philosopher's Stone Pipe Works. After two weeks, the lead turned to gold. I'm getting a refund!
"Even worse, expect the same monopoly conditions that prevail in the software industry to prevail everywhere else, too."
Even worse? How about even better. In the software industry, there are thousands of companies producing software: as far from a monopoly as you can get. Other industries such as automaking are nowhere near as decentralized.
According to the second article, the printer driver does the date computations and locks out the printer if certain conditions fail.
Do the Linux printer drivers have the same code in them? Anyone want to go look?
That ought to be an advantage of Free Software.
Indeed, RMS himself got the original hair up his backside because of a PRINTER DRIVER that he could not get the source too!
Same model, same exact problem. And it made me look like a total ass in front of the CEO who was trying to understand why it was taking me so long to change his ink! (probably the most interesting problem I've ever had with a printer, took a while to figure this one out) If this was an ultra high-end printer like you suggest I could maybe understand the quality control arguement little better but it isn't. It's off-the shelf crap that doesn't work as well as something much cheaper available today. We didn't even decide to buy it. Damn thing was a gift from one of our clients.
In theory, it's not a bad idea to advertise a "this cartidge is old, and past the optimal date of use" message - in fact, I'd even support this (particularly if the software told you how old the cartridge is, though not at every print job).
However, disabling the printing capability of the cartridge is just plain wrong... but from the article this sounds like a software issue instead of hardware, so perhaps somebody can come out with a crack or patch (perhaps even HP, if enough people bitch about it)
Anyone buying a $29.95 printer is accepting a contract that includes "... and you will buy our ink at our prices." Unlike selling expensive car parts, if you don't like the expensive ink, you can just throw away the printer.
Again, this just seems fair business. Granted, disabling cartridges after 4.5 years (gosh) seems a bit brutal. But hardly newsworthy. Let me see... my unused mobile phone minutes get killed each month. My unused gigabytes of transfer capacity get timed-out. If I don't watch my rented DVD one day, I have to return it anyhow. None of these things are particularly fair, but just as the consumer has the right of choice, the supplier has the right of deciding what product to make and how to sell it.
To some extent, people who complain about suppliers are just trying to excuse their own poor judgement in choosing those suppliers in the first place. "Oh, my Yugo broke down again, damn car."
Instead of complaining about HP ink prices, promote those suppliers who make refillable printers.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
The old Canons didn't have seperate printheads. The BJ*-2*0 series (I'm not censoring, I'm just mentioning a model line that had even had it's name changed) and essentially all of its predecessors have integrated printheads. I like that, because I also have a BJC-610, that had to have a meeting with a Q-Tip (after hours of searching on Canon's site for how to clean it if the built in cleaning doesn't work). The printer never worked right, but then again, it WAS refurbished. I had a BJ-200 that died soon after I got it (used, but not much), and a returned (due to a bad cable which didn't even come with the thing) BJC-240 (the other end of the 200 series) that took the old carts and worked for about one print - until my last old cart ran out!
For a long time I have wondered why the CIA was stupid enough to hand out Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the Muj in Afghanistan (during the Soviet occupation) but never thought about disabling the missiles after a certain amount of time. In recent years, they have been buying the missiles back from the guerrillas.
It would not have been hard to implement a timer to disable the missile's guidance system (e.g. self-destruct of some critical component based on radiodecay, with anti-tampering features). The timer could be for about 2 years (any physicists care to comment on how accurately this could be estimated?)
Yes, if you work hard enough and you are smart enough you could theoretically defeat any such measures. The point is to make it harder than your average illiterate guerrilla can manage.
No, it would not eliminate the threat of 'manpads' against civil airliners, because the Stingers are not the only such systems. But they are among some of the more effective ones. May as well make them as safe as possible.
The same idea could be extended to anti-personnel landmines, though this could compromise their effectiveness by making them easier to detect by enemy troops.
There are a few other non-evil printer manufacturers, I'm sure, but Canon seems to be the best as far as I've heard.
One problem: Canon USA refuses to port its printer drivers to operating systems not published by Microsoft or Apple and refuses to disclose the language that the printer understands to developers of free software because its standard NDA prohibits a driver developer from disclosing the driver's source code.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I once had an inkjet printer (in fact, I think was an HP) and there was a period of several months when I did not use the printer. Then when I tried to use it, it started making awful noises. I openned it up and found that the printer cartridge had exploded on me.
Ever have a pen explode? Well multiply that by about 400 times and you'll know how pissed off I was. My printer felt the heel of my boot after that.
I have an Epson now, but I get very nervous about old print cartridges and when I move, if I expect it to get hot or cold en route, I throw th eold print cartridge away.
- Thomas;
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
printer manufacturers are already under investigation for anticompetitive practices by the EU. If they have any sense, they'll back off fast.
Then they'll just make two kinds of printers: printers that work but only in Europe, and crippled printers that can work anywhere. Using a voltage transformer to circumvent region lockout of the EU printer in the US is a violation of the DMCA, as the printer's firmware is copyrighted.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Microsoft mice now to include odometer so users may not exceed the specified mileage limits as defined in the EULA.
I don't have an HP inkjet cartridge in front of me to verify this, but I thought that HP InkJet cartridges were warrantied for their lifetime until all the ink is used, I know the toner cartridges are at least. If it's under warranty, just send it back to HP and HP will send you a brand new full cartridge-bonus! I will say though I don't agree with this-maybe pop up a warning that reccomends you change the cartridge, but it shouldn't FORCE you to...
Ich bin ein Berliner.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
How much does it cost a colour laser printer?
I fully agree with you, but I need colour printing...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If only my milk cartons would self destruct after the experation date...
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I was responsible for installing our ERP software over at Gillette. As was typical, the company's liaison gave me the nickel tour up there in beantown before we got to work. Interesting place. Modern architecture was bolted on to stuff that was 100 years old. You could walk from one hallway through a door and go back in time.
As was common, we ended up at the company store where the liaison said I could get some great deals on product and refills. I sheepishly replied that I used Braun shavers and that I a never used a disposable blade in my life. His response was to laugh a say we got you covered. Gillette does Braun too. Got some super-cheap replacement shave heads.
I do believe the quality of the Braun rechargeable batteries has gone down to the point that the shavers stop holding a charge after a couple of years. Is this the work of the Mr. Gillette philosophy in the non-disposable shaver market?
We have a Tektronix Phaser 850 color printer - one of the fancy ones that takes blocks of solid, colored wax, and melts them down for ink.
We started getting a warning a few months back about "Change maintenance kit"... but the kit life is SUPPOSED to be ten thousand pages, and we've only done about 5000 on it since we installed it.
Turns out it's "10000 or one year" - which isn't mentioned on the status pages anywhere, and this little dinky maintenance kit that consists of a plastic tray, roller, and squeegee blade also has a little chip in a housing at the front of it, that locks in what time it was first installed.
If you try to roll the printer clock back, the date the tray was installed rolls back too. Clever buggers.
So now, we have this damned annoying error message that the sales droids keep forgetting isn't that important, and keep warning us about.
Oh, and how much for this cheap plastic tray, roller and squeegee (and completely unnecessary chip)? $90 US. Criminal.
Of course HP sell ink. But what is wrong with this? Did I miss something here, suddenly we're in a planned economy where suppliers can only sell products that are part of the grand 5-year plan?
It's like people bitching about Microsoft raising their license fees and (gosh) requiring people to register their software. "The bastards! What? How can it be legal? I thought everything was free? That was the point of the Internet, wasn't it? Does this mean I'm going to have to get a job?"
This whole printer/ink discussion is twisted and not a little hypocritical, because it is entirely driven by what people want: cheap upfront-costs and damn the long-term bills. HP and Lexmark are exploiting this, yes, but that's their right.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Yes, this definitely sucks for the consumer. On the other hand, HP claims that the ink goes bad, dries out, and causes all sorts of technical problems that they're trying to prevent for the consumer. Whether they're telling the truth or not is beyond me, since I don't own an HP printer. The way I see it, the best way to go is to use a laser printer for most of your crap and keep an inexpensive but relatively good inkjet around for printing photos and whatnot. I currently only have an inkjet and I can't tell you how often I am "too lazy" to print something out that I otherwise might because it's too much trouble.
And yes, I think it is unfair that HP has put technology into their ink cartridges to prevent them from working. A warning that the ink might go stale is enough, and if the consumer wants to risk a mess (or if the consumer is stupid like many people are and doesn't use its brain or doesn't have one) then it's their own damn fault if the printer gets screwed up and the warranty document should describe that. But technology that deliberately prevents non-weapon technology from functioning should be illegal. (Meaning that some sort of handprint technology on a handgun is a good idea to prevent a kid from finding his daddy's gat and blowing a hole in someone or something but CSS on DVDs and this thing HP put into their printer cartridges should be illegal, or at least unenforceable under law.)
HP SUCKS!
How about buying a printer from a different manufacturer?
If all four national manufacturers of inkjet printers with suggested retail prices under $200 do this, then where can an informed home user turn?
Will I retire or break 10K?
HP does this to discourage the refilling of cartridges. I'm sure that they're using a chip similar to Lexmark which has DMCA protection. Just another way that Congress helps out the consumer.
I had this problem. Talked to one of the engineers at HP. He verified that the ink cartridges should be good for 2.5 years after the expiration date on the box. The problem was that if you tried to INSTALL it after the exp. date on the box, you were out of luck (unless you set your PC clock back). Kind of fishy...
I found the trick on the web after about a half-hour of googling around, and it worked fine our printer -- but it was hard enough to find, and trivial enough, that I figure it's worth posting here.
Here it is. You'll need (1) a chipped ink cartridge that "thinks" it is full; (2) a similar ink cartridge that "thinks" it is empty; (3) your printer. Do this:
- Press the appropriate panel buttons to change the ink cartridge.
- Load the new ink cartridge into the printer carriage.
- Press the approriate panel buttons to put the printer online. The carriage will move off to the right side of the printer, in its normal parked position.
- Manually pull the carriage out to an accessible location (where it would normally be when you're changing the cartridge). This requires very little force but does require releasing the parking latch under the print carriage -- use a shim of some kind to sweep under the carriage from back to front. (The blunt side of a leatherman blade works great.)
- Swap out the new cartridge and put in the old cartridge.
- Push the carriage back into place. Listen for the latch.
- Print something.
The firmware in the printer reads in the chip counter values when you first load the cartridge, then writes them back after each swipe of the carriage. By swapping cartridges you write the "full" value into the empty cartridge. Then just reload with your favorite refill ink.Ding!
Looks like you've been using your printer for too many weeks! In order to avoid accidents, you'll need to pick up a replacement! (Don't forget a cartridge!)
[OK and Disable] [Charge CC and Continue]
Printer models go out of production and out of stock. So does their ink.
... cannot print. Not because the ink is bad or the printer is broken. The cartridge expired. I cannot refill. I cannot buy new ink (expired, not in stock and so on).
... to expire 6 months after the printer's no longer produced. Do you understand now?
The ink being sold is not neccessarily 'new', it may be years old. If there's no expiration date printed on it, I am cheated. (IIRC, HP does print expiration dates.)
So there I am, a 2 year old printer, some ink and
So what am I to do but to buy a new printer AND new ink?
And don't you talk about quality; even the worst refill ink is better than a white paper. Note that soon, the 4.5 years will be 1.5
Printer cartridges bring up an interesting viewpoint. Pardon me for rambling a bit.
According to Rick Russell: "99% of new compatible toner cartridges are manufactured in the USA; most "OEM" brand cartridges are manufactured overseas". Another site said that "Most oem brand [inkjet] cartridges are manufactured overseas". (The latter quote is here in a Google cache of this page, but some javascript keeps forwarding your browser to some Yahoo site for some reason; I saved the HTML and edited out the javascript in order to actually see the page.)
This suggests to me that corporations are making their products more and more proprietary because of the immense cloning operations going on overseas (particularly Southeast Asia), and to some extent America. Specifically, HP could produce a cartridge, which could be refilled cheaper, re-manufactured cheaper, and ultimately made cheaper by a company lacking HP's infrastructure costs (their high cost of making a sale, which I firmly blame their marketing mentality for).
In my viewpoint, corporate America apparently loves cheap labor until the cheapness threatens their own business methods. They love to outsource and export until they find their own competition from the same people. Having been unemployed for years because of stuff like this, I find myself unable to pity HP, Canon, Lexmark and the rest of them. These companies have a wholly and artificially high "cost of sale". In my opinion, it's largely due to the entrenched greed of their marketing departments, taking their cue from the huge compensation handed to company executives.
To recover from this without foolish things like lobbying and locking up designs, they should tone down their marketing strategies and return to a culture of "the product speaks for itself". HP could ensure the quality of printer cartridges to the extent that, say, a 30% increased sticker price would be worth it. But that would involve a lower profit margin since real quality assurance involves real investment on the part of the manufacturer. You'd have to bring back your facilities to a domestic location, for one.
Perhaps what I'm actually observing is that by outsourcing, one is actually creating one's own competition.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Liberal use of isopropanol(98% pure) and time will resurrect your cartri dges. Then print a couple of black /solid colored pages to make it stick.
These chiselers long ago ceased to be the great techology purveyors we knew them as when we were kids with our first scientific calculators.
They are now simple criminals selling cheap crap and defrauding the public with stunts like this one. Think of Detroit in the lat '70s, making cars that fell apart ASAP after the warranty expired (back when warranties were 12 months or 10K miles and excluded most non-drivetrain components).
Vote with your dollars. Their competitors' products sell for the same price or a few % more at worst, and you won't be supporting a pirated empire.
Lots of items have expiration dates. In many cases, it may even be illegal (or leave you open to a lawsuit) for a store to sell an item past its expiration date (think meat) or to use an item past its expiration date (think sterile medical products). The difference is that in almost every case, nothing is forcing the end user not to use the item past the expiration date. You can always put those expired batteries in your MP3 player if you only want a few hours use. You are also free to eat expired meat if you so choose. If you are crazy (or desperate) enough, you can even use expired medical products on yourself.
HP, however, seems to have chosen to make the expiration date manditory. Don't care about degraded print quality? Too bad, buy a new cartiridge. In my mind, it would be perfectly ok for HP to do what you mention compaq and sun have done: Warn the user that the cartiridge has reached the end of its life-expectancy so the user can make an informed decision regarding whether to replace the cartiridge or to continue using it.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
If the cartridges are sitting around that long then the printer is already useless, purely because of the fact that its owner is just not using it.
I have had laser printers for years, starting with the HP Laserjet IIP. There is no way that I would ever have an inkjet printer as my primary printer. The print quality, (actual) speed, and cost-per-page all make inkjet an idiotic choice compared to a laser printer. (Yeah, flame away, but it's true.)
But many people with laser printers would also like an inkjet printer for the infrequent page that needs to be in color. So they might go a month or more between printouts with that printer and the ink could easily last a very long time were it not for schemes like the one described in this article. But this article shows precisely why I don't have an inkjet printer: The manufacturers either sabotage their printers (ala HP) or make cartridges and print-heads that clog-up if they aren't used on an almost daily basis (the latter being the reason why I dumped my Canon BJC 5100 at a thrift store).
I think that all any reasonable person wants is to be able to buy an inkjet printer and have it print when he needs it, not have the cartridges commit suicide in between the times when they use the printer.
Now at least we know where Dilbert and his PHB work...
"The market decided" my ass. The market wants refillable ink cartridges. Companies like Lexmark and HP are using the DMCA to prevent this from happening.
Don't tell me the market decided on this crappy printer business model, where printer companies are competing to make the worst printer. If it did, the market isn't working properly. The market works when companies are competing to make the best product. This clearly is not the case in this situation: companies are competing to make the worst printer. Presumably something that sells cheap, prints out fast and high quality, but has enormous maintenance costs, and will no longer even have ink-cartridges for it in a few years.
Quite frankly, the market was tricked into accepting this fraudulant business model. All printer companies are frauds. Advertise their printers can print a certain speed, without qualifying the print-content per page, but allowing the consumer to believe that it can print out that many *full text* pages with images at high quality. Advertise that their printers can print really fast, but don't bother to inform the consumers of ink-consumption.
In short, they provide no information with which to allow consumers to make an informed decision on whether or not it would be better to buy one of the cheap-up-front expensive-ink printers or the expensive-up-front cheap-ink printers.
Also, since they never mentioned this back-weighted deal to the consumer, they don't get to bitch because consumers are looking for cheaper ink solutions.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
When a company gets an order from HP they should design a special product for them that self destructs :)
Tables and chairs that fall over etc..
OR...someone could just make a firmware crack.
Done and done.
You'll have that sometimes...
you get a Color laser printer.
Yes, it costs some $$$ out of the box, but the cost per page is an order of magnitude lower than inkjet.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Lexmark does this also, and so does Epson and Canon. Now Epson and Canon doesnt do this intentionally, but their printhead is seperate from their ink tank. This means that if the printer stands for about two months it dries out on the print head, and it is usually not worth replacing it on Canons, and you can't do it on Epsons. To try to fix this problem both canon and epson drop one picoliter of ink every 30 minutes. Sometime feel inside where the ink cartrigdge rests, it is is sopping wet w/ ink. HP doesnt have to drop as much ink b/c the print head is on the cartridge. Buy a new cartridge and you get a new print head. Now I am not condoning what HP is doing, I am just saying do not complain about HP it is the whole industry. P.S. HP has long had about 1 penny more than epson and Canon, but when you consider the price of the print head you sometimes have to replace b/c on Canons, and the new printer you have to buy on Epsons.
if you're doing heavy-duty printing of color images.
My experience with an old Epson 800 was about $.50/page for color images. But with my Tektronix 740p, its averaged less than $.05 per page after about 20,000 images.
The best part is when you no longer care about the cost of a single page, you tend to print color far more often.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The reason for SUV's being so popular is the inconsistent CAFE standards for cars and light trucks (SUV's).
The CAFE standards on cars strongly discourage the companies from making the substantial safe cars that most Americans want; so the companies get rid of the larger cars and station wagons and replace them with the tiny econoboxes.
Americans, still wanting the substantial vehicles, look instead to the pickups, SUVs, and minivans which the companies are able to make regardless of the CAFE standards which have forced them to make cars fewer and fewer people want.
Printer reviewers need to start reviewing the cartridges with the printers, then publishing the results with their reviews along with a way of estimating your actual cost for the printer/cartridges based on how much printing you do. Once the information is available it's just a case of buyer beware.
My printer? Epson LX-80 dot matrix. It's about fifteen years old and doing just fine, thank you.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Business Model Patent Application
Step 1: Lobby to pass a law like the DMCA which restricts the right to reverse engineer for the purpose of creating compatible products.
Step 2: Make a proprietary consumable.
Step 3: Use technology to restrict the life of the consumable.
Step 4: Sue those who try to offer an alternative (see Step 1).
Step 5: Jack up the prices.
Damn prior art!
Throw your carts in the freezer, whatever battery it contains will slow down, and so its clock will run slower. Well, assuming that's now it works. Now freezers will be banned under the DMCA. Oops.
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
I went to Best Buy to purchase a replacement ink cartridge. The store employee told me that you can use the HP 45 cartridges in place of the HP 15 cartridges. She explained that the 45 was just the economy size of the 15. She showed me HP 45s running in the demo models. She showed me that the 45 was the same form factor as the 15. I believed her.
Too bad my printer didn't.
Anybody need a non-returnable $48 HP 45 cartridge?
"The moment it does copyrights and patents become useless."
And the problem with that is?
"A free market does not mean I can set no ground rules on the use of my product."
Yes it does. It means that you can spread peanut butter with that screwdriver if you want. It means you can print images with an HP printer.... or you can toss the printer out the window. It means the freedom to use what you own.
Sorry for flying off the handle, if it is indeed a joke. What the hell is it supposed to mean? It's not funny in the slightest, unless I misread it. Nope, I read it again, it still makes no sense.
I don't know if it only my z32 but if I don't use my inkjet for a few months I had to buy another cartridge even the first one is full, since the printer starts to print like some of the ink is missing.
In my viewpoint, corporate America apparently loves cheap labor until the cheapness threatens their own business methods"
What is wrong with that? It seems obvious that no one wants to pay more than necessary for something, but they don't want the bargain rate to cut into quality. It is called paying for the real value of something.
"I don't think I've seen an HP printer I felt I really trusted since the original Deskjet and Deskjet 500."
I absolutely agree.
My trusty DeskJet 500 died a year ago, so I dusted off the DeskJet Plus I had in the closet. Working great. I just bought another DeskJet 500 for $5 from the local St. Vincent DePaul store as my new spare....
"You can do whatever drugs you want (heroin, cocaine, MJ, whatever) as long as it's in your house and you won't tell anybody about it
and you don't sell the drugs to other people
You can't do this, unless you add "you create them inside your house". Otherwise, you have to buy it from a dealer, which means you have told someone about it.
It was a real election, same as just about all the ones before. The national vote totals never mattered in the past, and they did not matter in 2000. What happened, as before, was that every vote was counted, and enough states were won to give enough electoral votes to put the current President (same as the ones before) in the white house.
The Supreme Court had nothing to do with it: the redundant recount they prevented was checked later and Gore lost that one too.
No, wait. A better analogy is if God decided the world had expired and made the Sun go supernova.
Or no, an even better analogy is if an ant is painting a masterpiece using Bob Ross oil paint and looks down and sees that the tube of paint has expired, and says "oh, no"
Or wait an even better analogy is if two people are arguing and one of them sees that the other's analogy has expired. Then he says, "Here, use mine"
I looked at this page and the advertisment at the top, just below the introduction, was one for HP saying "Exercise your freedom of expression."
Ok HP, you suck for doing this!
I have just bought an all-in-one from HP and am very pleased with it but I have this chip in my cartridge. The argument is that they want to ensure that you get top quality prints but I think that that is something that I should be able to decide for myself.
Kevin
"It's not the cough that carries you off, it's the coffin they carry you off in" O. Nash
I had an Epson 800 which would allow me to print 50-60 pictures before needing a new ink cartridge (full page graphics). Cartridges were $32. This is no exaggeration either. So my costs were roughly $.50 per page.
The Tektronix 740p gave me 18,000 copies (roughly) before I had to replace all 4 toner cartridges. The price of this was roughly $550. That comes to about $.04 cents a page.
But to look at it another way, had I printed out that many pages on my Epson 800 (even if it were possible), would have cost me close to $9,000!
This is my personal experience; but I think the costs quoted for color lasers are generally well under 10 cents a page.
Perhaps my epson was an ink vampire? . I don't know. But I know the color laser printers make a lot of sense if you're printing a lot of stuff.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
One time, while printing out a B&W PDF document, I noticed color fringing on the B&W text. The problem turned out to be a printer head alignment, which was easily fixed. But was the printer using color ink to print B&W documents?
Sure enough, if I force the print setup "Color:" option to greyscale, then a "High Quality" or "Black Only" option appears under a "Color Options" menu (in a different window). If I choose "High Quality" it's using the color ink cartridge to print B&W text, "Black Only" does not use the color ink cartridge.
Ie. when you print black and white documents on a HP d135 officejet, I'm pretty sure it uses the color ink cartridge too.
Even if you specify "Greyscale", it'll still use the color cartridge unless you find the other "Black Only" option.
I've been an HP customer for many years, but this might cause me to change (and change my recommendations to friends/family)
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
Simply put the ink in printer cartidges drys out and becomes a foam like substance. After 4 1/2 years it wouldn't matter if the cartidge didn't work. Presumable HP feels trying to use a 4 year old cartrige with the ink dryed out might damage things.
Of course, this is the optimistic view of things. The other side is they're doing this just so they can enforce the DMCA on competitors. Something that would be next to impossible to prove in court.
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After 4.5 years, the ink may be starting to dry out. I know that once you start using a cartridge, it can be hard to print if you print rarely. This happened to me with an Epson printer.
OfficeMax.com's price for an HP 3500-page toner cartridge is $81.99 (I chose them because I think that represents what the average person on the street could buy them for, as opposed to some tiny ma-and-pa shop with one-shot discount prices). At that price, you're paying $81.99/3500 = $0.023/page. I think that's a pretty reasonable estimate for the cartridge life, too, since my 1200SE is reporting that I'm currently 2952 pages into the toner cartridge that originally came with the printer and still getting clear, dark printouts.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I wonder if HP printers also suffer from this problem....
Anyone who prints in volume has always ignored those crappy ink utilities. It is a lot cheaper to waste a piece of stock or photo paper than to waste the precious ink fluid...
20 years from now US business and consumer practices will be condemned for the waste of natural resources. What makes profit in the short term is usually wrong for the environment and future availability of natural resources.
:( , but some of us took typing with the girls :) ) took drafting, electric shop, metal shop, wood shop, and plastic crafts. Those courses have helped me throughout the subsequent 45 years.
/.ers who feel HP has abandoned its quality tradition. Bill and Dave must be screaming from their graves.
I had an electric fan go bad because it had bushings instead of ball bearings. I then tried to deterimine which possible replacement fans had ball bearings - few retailers know or care. All sorts of rotating products which could last 20 years will fail in a couple because of this short-sightedness.
There are many more examples: poor tires sold with new cars, poorly-engineered plastic parts (plastic per se can be very good), dc motors without replaceable bushes, equipment poorly spot-welded instead of bolted or riveted,...
Of course, the typical consumer hardly knows how to replace a light bulb. When I went to junior high school in the 50's, we all (well just the guys
I worked one summer for HP, felt the pride of doing quality work, and bought their test equipment for the next 30 years as a physicist. Yet, I sadly agree with the
The sooner this tradition of waste ends, the better will be the future of civilization.
This was one incident written by 1 individual with a specific model oh HP inkjet printer that uses separate color carts. Can anyone confirm this expiration behavior with their own HP carts including the multi-color carts (non separate carts)?
The article says that HP stated that carts will not work if placed in the printer in 30 months or 4.5 years if not in the printer. How does the printer/cartridge keep track of time? Does the cart have an internal battery and date counter? Has anyone stripped open an HP cart to look for the mechanism?
Once this behavior is confirmed, then one can work towards a way to bypass this measure. But first we need confirmation.
I was satisfied with my BJC-5100 when I bought it (except for the fact I couldn't use it with Linux). But due to lack of drivers the printer completely stopped working when I upgraded from Win2k to WinXP. Their (helpdesk's) reaction: "bad luck..."
See my other comment for the full story.
I think interesting stories like this illustrate an evolution in the nature of capitalism in the tech sector. The traditional model of businesses providing products and services to the public is turning into a new model of the public providing consumption for businesses.
Instead of price-fixing we are seeing feature-fixing and terms-fixing. Tech companies are becoming increasingly arrogant in dictating how, by whom, and for how long their products can be used. In a way, it's a privatization of the central planning aspects of socialism. As businesses get licensing laws on their side, they can care less and less about consumer preferences, and can redefine competition in terms of b2b things like cost control and litigation.
And this all boils down to government being the problem. If government did not pass bad DMCA's or otherwise butt into private matters, the market would be a lot more free.
I tagged along with a friend this past weekend as he went to buy a sony video cam. On the way to the register, the salesman mentioned that the camera needed to be sent annually to the factory to get cleaning, for a $45 charge... and that this was enforced by a chip that prevented operation until this was done.
Had it been me, I would have refused to buy this cam. (total cost was $600, btw, so $45/year equals about 8%, to say nothing of the hassle of sending it in and waiting for it.)
My (non-technical) friend didn't seem to react at all. While standing in line I asked what he thought of the forced cleaning. His response was to ask whether I thought the salesman was giving correct info. I said "You bet. You'd be shocked at what companies are doing, and the reason is because enough consumers let them get away with it."
Case in point: he shrugged and bought the camera.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
If I worked for HP and saw this thread, I would say that the reason for the expiration, is that the ink starts to clog up over time and HP was getting a lot of clogged and damaged heads because of this. So really, by making the ink cartridges expire, they are saving the consumer from an expensive repair job.
this kind of shit should be illegal.
why isn't this illegal?
why does all the new technology come with a builtin straightjacket nowadays? what ever happened to consumer rights? someone figure out how to unchip these "self-expiring" pieces of junk and post it immediately! everywhere.
people are stupid.
they'll step into the leg irons with a dumb smile on their face if they're offered some feature enhancement to go with it. a little honey to make the medicine go down... they won't understand what an injustice it is for a company to charge them *extra* for the time spent making a product *less* useful.
Look at how absurde the DMCA is, I fear that maybe in some years the corps even really push the politicians to pass a law like the one I joked about.
Slightly off topic but...
If this is the case, then how can AMD prevent me using a non-stock AMD heatsink/fan combo with non-stock thermal paste and thus supposedly voiding my warranty?
Better remember this one for when you need to claim a dead chip back under warranty conditions and they tell you that you can't because you didn't use their tie-in HSF combo.
Visceral Psyche Films
"We gave them a 4 1/2 year lifespan because we felt that after that time they might grow emotions and become uncontrollable" - unnamed HP employee. As the printer cartridge would say to its maker: " I want more life, fvcker!"
Visceral Psyche Films
and unwanted by Canon
You can use generic drivers for some older series 4000 and 600 printers. Photo support sucks, and you're on your own with USB support.
And don't buy any Canon scanners if you need linux support. Some of the cameras are great, but you better get a PCMCIA reader for the compact flash card.
How'd you know?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I emailed HP cust. serv. and after several tries at getting a clear statement was finally sent this: 've retained their emails, if needed. Quote from HP support: "I am here to answer your queries and I will try my level best to answer your query, there is not chip available in the cartridge means that, the cartridge does not have any inbuilt chip. The cartridge does not have any chip or other technology inside that has the ability to turn off the functioning of the cartridge based on date." So, that's what they said. jon tkjtkj@charter.net
ENCAD Wins Preliminary Injunction in Suit Against HP's Below-Cost Pricing From the RECHARGER Magazine article: "On September 20, a California court granted Encad a preliminary worldwide injunction enjoining Hewlett-Packard Company from selling large-format printers at below-cost under its "Cash In & Trade Up" program." http://www.rechargermag.com/article.asp?id=1999110 81
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler