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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."
Unfortunately these kinds of abuses are prevalent throughout this industry, this specific one brings to mind the advert with for OfficeDepot, I think it is, where the guy reads out the cartridge numbers like it he is reading out lottery numbers.
It is annoying that standardisation has spread through the majority of hardware issues, but still remains stubborn when it comes to printer cartridges.
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every lexmark printer i've had to work with (and believe its been a quite a few) has been a cheap piece of crap. Most inkjets are pretty cheesy too. And the scary thing is, you can get quality lasers (samsung ml-1710) for under $100 if you shop hard. No funky multi-meg drivers required either.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
At a company I used to work for, we had a high-volume Ubix laser, which kept having problems with paper jams. Eventually the Ubix engineer blamed it on the fact that we were not using Ubix branded paper. We reluctantly switched to the overpriced paper, and the jams continued, but Ubix continued to refuse to honour the warrantee if we switched back to non-Ubix paper.
A lot of people get this impression of capitalism as being TINA (there's no alternative). Capitalism is as good as gravitation, magnetism, chemical kinetics: it is a number of phenomena that obey social or physical laws, and the result can or cannot be good for society (depending also on the definition of what "good" is)
Simple capitalism theory, including the demonstration that perfect competition is the most efficient way to produce goods, rests on three pillars:
When some of these assumptions go bananas, so goes efficiency, and that's when your wallet starts aching.
It is maybe worth noting that all requirements are in open contradiction, since you can't have perfect knowledge of a infinite market, nor is everything packed in only one market - e.g. ordering from abroad will cost you an "access fee" in the form of mailing costs, that makes buying a 1% cheaper ice cream in Bucharest unattractive if you live in Miami. This simply means that capitalism is achievable only as an approximation, how good depends on the people who set the rules.
In the case of printer cartridges, 1 goes bananas because every producer is a near-monopolist of his printers; 2 goes bananas because few know that it is possible to hack printers to pay less; and 3 because every printer manufacturer has his cartridge market, sometimes more as their printers are normally not cross-compatible.
So, this is indeed Capitalism 101, but at the distortion of market chapter. What needs to be done is a state-imposed standard on printer cartridges, to reinstate competition and fair pricing. Start bullying your politicians today!
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
I know how you feel - there's an Epson Stylus printer at work that uses four separate colour cartridges and refuses to print if any of the colours is empty. So if you've run out of Cyan, you have to install a new Cyan cartridge before you can print your page of black text. There can't possibly be any technical or logical justification for this - they're very clearly just trying to force their customers to keep buying new cartridges. It stinks, and I certainly won't be buying Epson in the future.
My personal printer is an HP, and they seem to be a bit less brazen about this sort of thing. Admittedly their cartridges are expensive, but my local supermarket does compatibles for a fiver (about the price of two cappuccinos), so as far as I'm concerned HP can make up whatever stupid price they want for the official ones.
As always there are two sides to this:
One is the fact that ink is too expensive, and manufacturers know that. Price of really cheap printers is intentionally as low as it can be, and by using proprietary ink cartridges, manufacturers are only protecting their investment. They sold you a cheap printer, and hope to get their money back on cartridges. It's not just the cartridges. Ever wondered why most of the printers are shipped without printer cable?
A printer cable can cost as much as $25 for a 3m cable, and yet the real price of the cable must be under $1 in bulk. Talking about profit...
The other side has it with print quality. Printer HAS to know, because of the way it's designed, what kind of ink is in the cartridge. Electronics has to be able to direct correct amount of ink at the right time. Replacement ink usually has different physical properties (boiling point, composition, amount of pigment), and the printer has no way of detecting what really got through to paper surface. So with different cartridges you will get different quality and even different colors on paper.
My mother in law owns a Con S450, which started generating the error code (flashing orange/green) ...-o-o-o-o-o-o-g-... repeatedly.
... but it seems to me applicable to this topic.
Looking it up on the web, we found this (google cache) and this (google cache).
I'll let people make their own opinions, so that I don't accuse them
Anyhow, we don't have a fix, nor much expectation of getting one.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
All it takes is adding something to the ink that makes it a bit more viscous or a bit less, and then modifying the mechanism to cope.
I'm surprised the Big Inkjet Printer Manufacturers haven't already done so.
When I used a printer, I used a laser that someone had tossed out, which worked nicely.
Now, though, I just plain don't print anything. Everyone likes having things in electronic format, anyway. These days, most things handed to someone on paper just get entered into a computer.
May we never see th
If they really wanted to, couldn't manufacturers embed a passive RFID tag inside the body of the cartridge to ensure "their" printer only uses "their" brand ink?
I think for that to happen, they would however need a way to make the cartridges non-refillable.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
When I ponder the ink cartridge issue in my head I try to relate it to the auto industry. With manufacturers oursourcing their pars more and more, the chances of two products from competing products containing the same or very similar parts increases. On the one hand the manufacturer is trying to determine the value of manufacturing a component over its lifetime. On the other hand the consumer wants the parts as cheaply as they can get them. Either way the R&D and engineering that want into designing the component should be reimbursed. Same thing with drugs. Same thing with art.
But then again the gas and fuel filling recepticles on cars are universal. But in that case the engineers in one industry (automotive) were makeing their product compatible with a system designed by another industry (petroleum). Maybe a company should come along and supply really good ink at commodity prices. Maybe printer companies wouold then have an incentive to standardize. Of course they would also probably have to char 5X for the printer or just plain get out of the printer business.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I work for an Authorized Xerox/Tektronix Repair site for the 840 - 860s, 3rd party ink can really mess up the printer. (I have seen stalactites and stalagmites of Wax (Well it is a resin) Ink forming all around the printer. and heads getting clogged where they normally don't get clogged, The 3rd Party Ink has a slightly different melting temperature and/or Cooling temperature. Which can ruin the printer because it is fairly well timed for the use of the original ink. If you think you can just put in some "Tek" ink in the printer when you need it repaired, we can normally tell that you used 3rd party ink before (Sometimes we let it slide (but give you a warning afterwards) or sometimes we can't. When you use 3rd party ink the ink when dried is more flexible then the original stuff. The 3rd party Ink is actually different stuff and can cause major (and expensive problems with the printer)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They way printer manufacturers try to sell cheap printers only to then make money by selling the ink has gotten really ridiculous. Let me tell you an example: Somebody I know has a small PC shop in addition to his normal job. Some weeks ago, he got an offer from one of the sellers he gets his hardware from about a pretty cheap Lexmark printer (Z65pro IIRC, some color ink printer with integrated 10/100 print server). They offered the printer to him for about 60 Euros, including a "high capacity" color ink cartridge. Since this was pretty cheap, he ordered fifteen printers and then sold them to some of his customers who were looking for a cheap printer to go with their new computer. Some of them also wanted an additional ink cartridge, just in case. My colleague then looked what a new original Lexmark ink cartridge for this printer would cost - 70 Euros!
...
End result: he ended up buying ten additional PRINTERS, stripped them of the ink cartridge (which he then sold to his customers) and sold the printers, without ink cartridge, for a few Euros each on eBay. It was actually FAR CHEAPER to buy a WHOLE NEW PRINTER than to buy an additional ink cartridge.
Instead of buying ink - just throw the printer away and buy a new one
I have Panasonic cordless phones -- two phones with one battery each, and one spare battery recharging in the base station. The Panasonic batteries were expensive and hard to find, but I found an identical, generic battery at Sears. The battery didn't fit -- until I removed an extraneous bit of plastic with a Dremmel tool. Works like a charm...
I really hate the fact that the cost of replacement carts can and often do exceed the cost of an inexpensive printer. I don't do a whole lot of printing anymore because of the excessive cost of these danged carts.
When you buy replacement part for a car, you have several choices. You can buy parts from the OEM, you can buy parts on the secondary market from after market manufacturers and you can buy parts from rebuilders. There are advantages and disadvadvantages to each. You know those advantages and purchase accordingly.
It used to be the same with replacement parts for printers but with the DCMA and other regulations, it is now more or less a thing of the past. It is wrong. The manufacturer is now able to say "One of the things that you do when you buy this printer from us is you enter into a relationship with us for as long as you own the printer." This is not what I expected. I wonder what's next - will they develop a printer that only works with the paper they make?
I've contemplated buying a printer and modifying it so that I can easily refill it using syringes filled with ink. But I understand that Lexmark, HP and others have started building in "smart chips" that kind of count the ink that the cart dispenses. These chips then simply shut down after a perscribed amount of time. I don't know how true this is but I think I'll try this with my $35 Lexmark just to see.