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Getting Around Printer-Manufacturer Abuse
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a guy that demonstrates how printer companies abuse their clients. He found that Lexmark cartridges are a perfect replacement for Xerox ones, with only minor modifications to the printer.
It's well illustrated with may photographs."
Normally I found that Lexmark cartridges are insanely prices compared to the other brands which shows up furthermore in the price-per-page comparisons you often see.
:-?
Personally I've gone for the 4-cartridge Canon systems for inkjet and a HP 2200D Laser for the normal stuff (using refurbished toner cartridges - a mere $118 rather than $269 - complete with warranty).
This guy certainly proves that a little bit of searching around sure saves a LOT of money.
The whole printer-ink system reeks of things like the Debeers diamond cartel.
Now, I wonder how long this guy's WWW site will stay up
So... I just checked an ink vendor and the lexmark cartridges they had (same model numbers from the story) were 2x as expensive as the Xerox ones. Nice to know that you're not locked in to the vendor, but beyond that - I think I'd find the Xerox cartridge a better buy. (The vendor was Laser Monks)
When for about the same price as that cart u get a refill kit that can do 10x the number for nothing, when it wears out your print head cause its bad ink, buy another printer and you've still saved thousands in ink costs.
Article from the Chicago Tribune (free reg needed): http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-02102 2ink,1,1030029.story
A cartridge conspiracy
By Phillip Robinson
Knight Ridder/Tribune
Published October 22, 2002
Ford and Chevron have partnered to design a new SUV. They claim it will run smoother and longer on a gallon of gas than any other SUV in the same class.
However, you'll have to use a special Chevron Premium gas that costs 30 percent to 70 percent more than typical gas. It's up around the $3- to
$4-a-gallon level. Use any other gas from any other station and a microchip in the tank will detect the difference and prevent the SUV from starting.
That protects you from poor performance and possible damage to the finely tuned engine. In fact, trying to use any other gas can sometimes void your warranty.
Relax. It isn't true. In cars, that is. (My apologies to Ford and Chevron.)
But it is true in computer printers.
Time to stop relaxing.
Some of the biggest inkjet printer makers are implanting chips in inkjet cartridges. These chips monitor the ink supply and let you know when you're getting low. They can even freeze the printer when the cartridge is empty. Supposedly that can permanently damage the printer.
So far, not so bad. Pretty much all cars have a fuel gauge, and all printers should, too. I loved when Lexmark added ink supply monitors to its software, so I could see how much was left. Few things are more annoying than getting halfway through a vital document only to run out of ink.
If and when you do find the cartridge, let's hope it isn't your first time buying replacement ink. First-timers are typically shocked at what they have to pay. That $100 inkjet printer may need three $35 cartridges to get back in a printing mood.
No wonder HP makes more profit on "consumables" such as ink than on anything else. No wonder Dell wants into the business. No wonder there's a busy
"recycling" and "remanufacturing" business in discount ink cartridges.
A growing number of companies refill used cartridges, and then sell them - often on the Internet - for 30 percent to 50 percent less. That saves you a lot of money and saves dumps from piles of dead cartridges.
But the remanufacturers won't be able to put a new chip in this latest cartridge design. Or be able to set the old chip back to recognizing "full."
Once that cartridge is empty, it's kaput. No recycling, no savings. The chip "squeals" on any attempt to reuse.
Some inkjet printer owners use their own refill kits to save even more money on ink. These kits are available even in some standard stores. They include a syringe, large bottles of ink and instructions. You fill the syringe and
then inject your cartridges. There's the danger of a mess, and of voiding the warranty, but there's also the prospect of saving 80 percent to 90
percent.
Smart chips in cartridges will also be able to terminate this savings. Once a cartridge is detected as empty, the chip can refuse to recognize it again as full.
It's called "lock in." Many tech companies are looking for ways to lock their customers in, to make it difficult or impossible for customers to
switch to using other suppliers in the future.
Of course, they don't advertise it that way. And many of their engineers and marketers may honestly not believe it that way.
They'll talk about the quality of the ink they make. How it's as much a part of the printing technology as the hardware and software. How you need all three working together to get the full performance. How they want to protect
you from bad prints, and the clogged inkjet tubes and broken printers that cheap ink can cause.
And you know, they're sometimes right. Cheap ink can make cheap-looking prints. No-name ink can clog those tiny jets in your printer.
But shouldn't you be the one to make the decision about which to use? Do you want the company "protecting" you ag
I don't think they do an Epson chip resetter, though. Mine cost $19 from some store somewhere and has reset everything it's come into contact with, no problem.
After a bit of researching I also picked up a canon (i550 model). How refreshing to see the ink cartridges are just that - not cartridges + printheads + drm chips.
The print quality is very good for the price (US $110 or so for the 550) and the inks are sold separately _for each color_ to save you money if one color runs out faster than the others. If you are really a cheap bastard you can use third party ink refilling kits without worry, but I've found the quality to be slightly better using the real canon inks.
Best part - a manufacturer original black ink cartridge costs $15 at normal retail. Try finding that for your lexmark or xerox or hp. There are third party knockoff cartridges even cheaper, but they may not print as well on e.g. glossy photo paper.
The i550 is slightly cheaper than the real "photo quality" ones that have special photo color inks in addition to the regular cmy ink. If you are a real photo quality nut you probably want one of those.
I would buy another one in a heartbeat. Screw all those greedy customer screwing "but look how cheap the printer is" bait and switch bastard manufacturers.
Lexmark, Ink. (pun intended) should be beaten with a rubber hose until they drool on the floor.
I have a old Canon BJ-200, that while the quality is not of Lexmark on its best day, I could plug it in right now and it will work - the carts never dry up. Ever. I am fully confident that the fossil record will show this.
I also have a old Panasonic KX-somthing or other that is noisy as hell but will print my obiturary, I'm sure. Which will most likely be soon, as I can't afford food after buying Lexmark supplies.
Anyhow, if Xerox and Lexmark are using similar carts, that is pretty much a big flag to avoid both companies like a strip bar named 'Fish n' Chips'.
Oh, you might be tempted, but there is something they're not telling you.
I had one of these, and I thought it would be great, given that you just buy ink cartridges, instead of the whole head every time. I was also wrong---don't use it for a week and it starts to dry up. Take a 3 week vacation and the printer is shot--and there's no way to remove the ink head assembly or to clean it, so basically it was a wasted printer. I'm currently using a Lexmark X125 (multifunction fax-style printer) that uses the same cartridges which the article showed. About the same price for ink as the Epson C42UX, but I get a new print head everytime.
I have a designjet 120 large format printer that uses 6 colors.
It has replacable print heads for each color, but get this... They only work with a specific color even though they are probably identical otherwise.
That means I have to always have 6 spares on hand in case just one of them goes bad!
It ticks me off I can't find a decent 24 pin dot matrix new anymore
Epson still make dot-matrix printers. See the Impact Printers category on Epson's website.
Ever heard of magnet:// and ed2k:// links? Even bittorrent does something similar but you need to host the .torrent.
insured for AIDS RAPE? [crazyninjas.org]
Oh my fucking god... I wonder how many times the dude who created that picture had to vomit till he was finished. THAT THING is really the MOST DISGUSTING I've ever seen.
Is Continuous Ink System another name for the inconvenient and inherently ugly hack where you put syringe connected to a bottle outside of the printer?
I have tested one such solution, and it was anything but portable. It depended on printer being able to support it, worked only on some models, and required modifications involving cutting a hole on one side of printer, so the tubes could get through.
It did work however, but it is not a solution I would recommend for faint of heart..
OTOH, while googling, I found
http://www.eddiem.com/photo/CIS/cis.htm
with a mightly ugly home made CIS hack, and some usefully info on cartridge chips..
I looked all over the web for the Xerox XK40c, AFAIK it has long been discontinued. None of the current Xerox multifunction color printers use inkjet, they're all color lasers now. No wonder the ink carts are so expensive, they're legacy supplies. Toner is cheaper.
Two problems with that:
A) Europe doesn't automatically mirror dumb US laws. They don't have a DMCA style law.
B) Argentina isn't in Europe.
also she said that the damage was probably caused by
... and the repair turned into being a freebee (except for my time and effort, of course).
our use of third party wax ink cartridges
Reminds me of the time I installed a non-Factory radio in
my new car. The car wouldn't start, so I had it towed back
to the dealer. Bad solenoid in the starter, but then they
claimed that my new RADIO caused an electrical fault in the solenoid. I thought it sounded VERY fishy, and since I had a roadtrip to make in the next two days, I told them to "just #$((# replace it".
I had them replace the starter and I -KEPT- the core (old part) for
personal inspection.
After opening it up, I saw that the pushrod of the solenoid was manufactured a little suished - like a press mistkenly whacked it and distorted it - clearly a manufacturing error. Wrote a nasty-gram with a photo of the part
Lesson learned: if someone tells you it's not covered by warrenty because YOU did something wrong, don't believe them.
I had an Epson with a similar limitation, I think; I simply used to remove and replace the empty colour cartridges when they got empty. The printer would detect that a cartridge had been replaced, but not the actual ink level of the cartridge. Have you tried that?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I had an upper end QMS departmental printer, about UDS 30000. One day a Ricoh salesman came through, and looked at my printer and started laughing. Turns out most of it the same hardware. Then, I accidentally found out that Digital was selling the same printer.
So I compared consumables prices, and the same toner cartridges, OPC kits, etc. were at wildly different prices. I bought my stuff from Digital and cut my monthly costs in half.
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
...and will keep doing so till it dies natural death. The only difference between "low-yield" and "high-yield" cartridges is that "low-yield" are sold half-empty anyway.
I actually like that fact that Xerox doesn't seem to ship the low-yield variant.
Spend $20 on low-yield, $30 on 3 "double" refill sets till cartridge dies. Cost: $50, print: 6.5 cartridgefuls of ink.
Spend $40 on high-yield, $30 on 3 "double" refill sets till cartridge dies. Cost: $70, print: 7 cartridgefuls of ink.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
You are incorrect; Europe does have DMCA laws.
For the record: the DMCA laws on "protection of rights management information" originated with the WIPO Internet Treaties in the late 1990's: the parties to the treaty must implement provisions in national law to comply with the terms of the treaty. The US implemented DMCA. The EU implemented the Copyright Directive. The UK implemented changes to the UK CDPA 1988 to comply with the Copyright Directive.
So, (A) the EU does have a DMCA style law, and (B) the EU laws do apply to any type (not necessarily electronic / digital) technological measures relevant to any rights management information used to protect copyrights. However, for other reasons, it is unlikely it could be used in this particular case because you're not violating copyrights by altering a good that you've already purchasing (quite simply: there's no act of copying involved).
If doing that do be aware that the ink cartridges sold with some printers are not full, or at least it used to be that way.
After taking a lexmark inkjet out back and having an Office Space session with it I purchased the i550. It is hands down the only ink jet printer I've ever owned that I am satisfied with:
* Ink is inexpensive
* Cartridges can easily be refilled if you want to.
* No DRM, no false "your ink is low" messages
* It has never ever jammed on anything.
* It's very quiet compared to the HP, Lexmarks and Xeroxes I've owned in the past.
* It is built like a tank (especially compared to Lexmark which is built like a cereal box).
* it is $99 at Office Max/Depot/Whatever
-- $G
I have an older Epson Stylus 860 that does the same thing - if the color cartridge is empty, you have to replace it before you can print anything, even if it's black text you want to print. And it does that even if only one of the colors in the three color cart is empty. Used to drive me up a wall until I discovered, quite by accident, that you can take the empty color cartridge out, shake it vigorously for 10-15 seconds, and then replace it. Check the status monitor, and it appears that the empty cartridge is actually full.
I have no idea how this works, but I am guessing that the little bit of residual ink is coating the sensors and fooling them into thinking it's full. Of course, you can't actually print color docs, because there's not really any color ink in there, but it's saved me from many an unnecessary trip to buy a color cart I don't really need in order to print out the text that I do.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Also, with respect to budget brands, your description is a massive oversimplification. In fact, budget brands are a technique of market segmentation. Usually the margins are better with the top part of the market but the volume is bigger in the bottom - sometimes, the budget brands are nearly identical, just a different label slapped on them (look for example at FridGEMore washer/dryer units, sold under several brands at rather different price points). The point is that budget-branding is a marketing driven process, and often there is plenty of room in the margins to sell the high end product under a budget brand. Sometimes the product is intentionally "cheapified", not because the manufacturer needs more room to price the product down, but because they don't want to cannibalize the market of their premium branded products.
Socialism? you are out of your fucking mind. That is fascism, you shit-for-brains fool.
"No warrantor of a consumer product may condition his written or implied warranty of such product on the consumers using, in connection with such product, any article or service (other than article or service provided without charge under the terms of the warranty) which is identified by brand, trade or corporate name
Simply put, the warrantor can not void a warranty because of the use of an aftermarket part. Furthermore the warrantor must show that an aftermarket part caused the damage in question that they wish to void the warranty over. While this act was passed to protect automotive aftermarket part manufacturers I'm guessing it could be applied to this situation. Maybe someone with Westlaw access could check.
Check out "Understanding the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act" for some more information.
Of course getting a manufacturer to obey the law and not try to weasel out of their obligations is something completely different.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
I echo the endorsement of Canon as a company that plays more fair than the competition. For one thing, when I bought my Canon inkjet, it had full-use cartridges included, unlike HPs which have special partially-filled ones. They also have separate cartridges for each colour, so you can buy the individual colour when it runs out with no problem. Finally, the printer seemed to be a cut above the competition in durability.
But I have no trouble finding/buying Canon printers. Fry's, Best Buy and CompUSA all stock them, no problem.
Incidentally, I highly recommend my HP Color LaserJet 3500 - it's much cheaper per page even though you eventually have to replace the toner cartridges at huge cost.
D
I would like to also chime in with a note that Canon ink cartridges are made of a clear plastic, which means you can be assured that when the ink monitoring software warns you that you are low or out of ink, you can trust it. If you don't, just raise the lid and take a look for yourself.
Another thing, I think, that makes the price of newer Canon ink tanks cheaper is that there are no electronics on the tank itself. The printer doesn't actually "talk" to the tank. The printer uses a detection scheme that uses light to figure out when the tank is low/empty. Without the electronics involved, production has to be cheaper.
All this also makes it easier to refill the tank with 3rd party ink.
I've got an HP Officejet D Series and have always wondered why black is printed with CMYK by default instead of pure black. Perhaps the manufacturers are trying to come up with the MOST INEFFICIENT way to consume your consumeables. =P
If you are ever in the situation where an empty non-black cartridge is preventing you from printing black text, look to see if there is a printer option that allows you to specify not only "greyscale" printing but "black only" printing. On my HP at least, this will create perfectly serviceable black text using only the black ink cartridge.
-ST
Interestingly, this is also true in the laser printer realm. I got sick of paying ~$35 every two months or so for an ink cartridge, so I started looking for a decent personal laser printer. I settled on the Lexmark e210 because it's fast, cheap, and uses USB. Though I don't have to replace the toner often, it's still expensive (about $70 a pop!) and I didn't feel like shouldering the expense. That's when I discovered that the Samsung ML1210 takes the EXACT SAME toner except for a minor difference. The Lexmark toner has tamper-proof screws; the Samsung doesn't. So, you make your slight modification to the printer, you buy one Samsung toner cartridge, and then dump toner in whenever you need more.
The reason your ink counter reset is because you removed the cartridge. Newer cartridges would not reset on their new line; they have a chip that meters ink usage. The reason they do this is quite simple; if you use the printer without ink it will ruin the head. Epson uses a micromechatronic head system consisting of a diamond attenuating in a pressurized chamber. If you run their ink system without ink "which acts as a cooling agent and a lubricant", you will fry the head and/or the quality will degrade considerably. The reason it refuses to print after the color is empty, even if you are just printing b&w is due to the fact it primes and cleans the heads before use, which uses both cartridges. If you do that without ink, you will hurt and/or fry the head. I've seen many of their old systems get fried because of this; fortunately their new system isn't as susceptible to this workaround of the protection system.
I have to say as a recovering Textronixer that when the thing worked, it worked beautifully. I have not seen any printer that could make full color graphic printouts that nice.
On the other hand, the thing almost never worked right. Aside from the 10 minute (yeah) warm up cycle, it had to go through 5 minute "re-warm" cycles to print big jobs.
Oh, and it couldn't handle a wide range of paper stock.
Oh, and the web server interface for configuration has wide open security holes in it. (firewall your printer guys)
Oh, and it was a lot of money to replace the wax.
Oh, and repairs and cleaning are super expensive.
I have no doubt that the printers in the lobby of the company that makes them get enough TLC to work right all the time.
Anywhere else though, and they are a waste of money, and probably time as well.
[That "do not move while hot" thing probably should be pasted on big stickers all over the thing, as the first response to a jam or glitch is usually to open it up and re-seat the wax rollers... which probably killed ours for good.]
(anyone want to buy a 740? cheap, just gotta figure out how to keep it from bleeding ink onto every page)
Obviously, the underlying technologies were very similar for these different OEM products. For purely marketing reasons, the products were made noncompatible. Engineers always resent this, but we need to realize that, like it or not, engineering is less a predictor of product success than marketing.
Disabling the keying features to allow your printer to use different ink cartridges is not very useful. You still must buy a new ink cartridge. Not much savings.
Refilling is theoretically a better way to save money, but it's problematic. Much as toner isn't just black dust, all inks are not created equal. Reliable inkjet printing is actually a surprisingly technical matter once you're past the consumer impression of "spray ink on a page" and you get down to the complex underlying chemistry and physics. The ink formulation is very important. I could go into tedious detail, but there probably isn't much general interest, and I do not want to take the chance of violating a nondisclosure agreement. Information that seems like common knowledge to an engineer is often considered a trade secret.
My conclusion is, you may or may not be able to drill and fill ink cartridges with some generic ink. The cheap ink refill kits are very likely to be a complete waste of time and money. The more expensive kits aren't really that much cheaper than the cartridges for the hassle involved, and they still may or may not work, and even when they work the print quality will suffer.
I've experimented with drilling and filling myself for my own very small scale use, with mixed results. You might reasonably expect to get one more use out of a filled cartridge on average, but the print quality will be worse because of unrecoverable clogged nozzles or burned out heaters. But keep in mind that I already knew a lot about the inner workings. YMMV.
A much better strategy to save money on ink cartridges is eBay. Don't buy the "remanufactured" cartridges. Those are just cartridges that someone else has drilled and filled, with about the same questionable results you could obtain for a lot less money. Instead, buy new cartridges in the manufacturer's sealed bags. They usually sell for less than half the price of online discount office supply stores. That makes them about the same price as the better refill kits, for a lot less hassle, and with a lot better print quality.
The fundamental issue here is, and always will be, marketing. It isn't just Lexmark. Our consumer habits force printer companies to sell printers at a loss and make up for this by inflating the price of supplies. The often used razor blade analogy is exactly correct. Companies are in business to make money. This is a good thing. You know the situation is screwed up when the price of an inkjet printer is consistently the same as the cost of the cartridges that ship with it. Of course, this does nothing to foster brand loyalty. When you can buy a printer with ink cartridges for the price of the replacement ink, that's what a lot of people do. Sadly, the printers go to the landfill as a monument to our consumption obsessed society. But I repeat, this problem is industry wide. It is not unique to Lexmark.
Low cost printing tips:
1) About half of Lexmark inkjets are Linux compatible. Check www.linuxprinting.org to see which work with Linux.
2) For volume printing, get a laser printer. Both color and mono lasers and toner are widely available on eBay. Printer prices start at about $40. Try to get a printer you can pick up locally, because shipping is usually $40-$80. All
When my old Lexmark Optra EP postscript 600dpi laser printer ran out of toner, I noticed that it cost approx. (CAD)$90 to buy a replacement. This is too expensive, when I can buy a used Lexmark Optra LX+ postscript 1200dpi laser with a higher resolution and a larger and full toner cartridge for only (CAD)$120, although the LX+ is a huge and noisy beast compared to my small EP.
:-)
Anyways, since I had 3 empty laser toner cartridges, which have removeable soft plastic stoppers to the toner reservor, I thought, why not refill them myself? After all, people with inkjets typically use refill kits, so why not just buy the laser toner powder. Well it took a while, but I managed to find a shop in Toronto that sold bottles of the black laser toner powder specific to my printer. (Different types of laser printers may have fusers, which melt toner, set at different temperature, so one has to make sure to get the toner powder that is proper for their printer.)
These bottles of laser toner powder come in a case of 10 for less than (CAD)$80, with each bottle containing 85g of black powder which will fill up a toner cartridge to the brim for less than (CAD)$8 each. Since it was raining outside, I took a funnel and refilled 3 of my empty cartridges in the bathtub in case of spills. And not only was it quick and easy, without any mess, my refilled cartridges print just like new. And since I bought the case of 10 bottles, I can print all I want for several years without worring about toner.
Alicia.
You think this is funny? It's true. Go to dealnews.com or one of the other deal sites and you can find a complete printer with instant rebate and free shipping for less than a new cartridge.
Additionally, if you want to screw best buy or other retailers, go buy a printer, but *don't* buy the cable. Ever notice how printers don't come with cables anymore? Their prices on the printer are below what they pay for them, and then they jack the price of a $2 cable to $27 (for a USB cable at best buy) to make their money. If you buy the printer without the cable, they actually lose money. Then buy your cable off the net for a couple bucks.
Doing a quick whois seach networksolutions.com reveals that the site is based in the US so Xerox could sue to get the info pulled within US jursidiction, but they couldn't touch the author according to the DMCA because he's not in that jurisdiction. IANAL, so I wonder what legal channels Xerox could take in Argentina.
30 characters are fine for a s
This may all be true for thier higher-end models but I've found that for low-end injet printing there is nothing like a Lekmark Z35 and a refill kit. All together it costs about 100 CAD and with the refill kit it just keeps going. Personal experience has been that the low-end cannon cartridges are so small that refilling them is not worth the effort: my last one (S200) only got about 50-100 pages of text from a full cartridge. Thats 20-40c/page or too much time spent refilling it!