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HP Secretly Rendering Printer Cartridges Unusable?
Momoru writes "Looks like a woman is suing Hewlett Packard, claiming that their "smart chip" technology, besides giving information about ink usage, is also secretly programmed to not work after a certain certain date." From the article: "HP ink cartridges use a chip technology to sense when they are low on ink and advise the user to make a change. But the suit claims those chips also shut down the cartridges at a predetermined date regardless of whether they are empty." We've reported recently on printer companies making questionable business decisions.
Meanwhile, people may try this trick to hack expiry date on ink cartridges, which might have been proven to work.
Do these cartridges have expiry date printed on them?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
...it just quotes people who sometimes have agendas.
Does this woman actually have proof of this or is she just angry about having to pay HP's prices for replacements?
It wouldn't surprise me at all, but I'll believe it when I'm able to read the alleged expiration date off of my own HP cartridges. I've had an HP printer for 2 years--some of the cartridges are original and some have been replaced just once. I can't say I've ever had them stop working or falsely report empty. The nice thing is the cartridges are even a clear case so I can easily optically verify whether they are empty or not.
I'm sure dried ink can reek havoc on printer heads. This is not necessarily an attempt to screw over their customers
I know they say its good to replace the nozzles every once in a while, but with every ink tank???
HP/Lexmark/etc. need to learn that consumers aren't willing to pay these taxes anymore.
I guess now we know why printers are HP's last profitable division.
There arent too many details on this, but i ran the cartridge in my HP printer (Photosmart 1110) bone dry. This was long after their software was telling me my cartridge was empty.
SYSOP ('sih-sop) n.: the guy laughing at your typing.
I believe this issue previously came up with HP plotters. People were installing "new" ink cartridges in their plotter, only to discover that the cartridge had expired. HP's explanation was that old ink cartridges could cause expensive damage to the plotter by clogging up the ink system with deteriorated ink.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
HP and Lexmark are discussing a merger.
...that this is true. My trusty older HP2000C business color inkjet still sees regular use with both Windows XP and OS X. Anyways, the cartridges (HP 10, and also HP 11 which work fine) have an expiration date printed on the foil package. I had occasion to install one of these once and the printer configuration software told me it was expired and refused to use it, even though I could shake it and hear it was full.
Oh kmon. Don't wirry about it.
Since this seems to be the first major suit announced, it'll be interesting to see how it works under the new law. Will there be real limits on attorney's fees? Will it be tied up in Federal Court even longer than it would've been in State Court? Will customers see something other than a coupon to buy more ink?
Stay Tuned to find out!
WTF?
HP Secretly Rendering Printer Cartridges Unusable
and Canon, Epson, Oki, Brother,... They all slowly render my printers unusable by selling me ink at $38000/gal, which slowly makes my wallet thinner and thinner until eventually I have no money left, I have to sell my home, put my wife on the street, dress my kids in rags and send them to beg at street corners, and get me a cardboard box to sleep in at night, and protect my (now useless) printer during the day...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Another class action lawsuit whereby the lawyer gets a third of everything plus expenses and we get a coupon or some vague opportunity to get a small fraction of the money we have been cheated out of. The RIAA was sued for price fixing and hence stealing about 500 million dollars. They only had to pay back about 40 million + another 40 million worth of CD's no one wanted to buy. If you factor in the tax deduction (approximately 35%) and their savings in warehouse space due to dumping a few million CD's they could not sell anyways they are basically out the cost of the plaintiffs legal fee.
Inkjet was always touted as the 'razor' for any company coming up in the ranks. The problem is ... much much much research $$ goes into finding pigments and dyes that are permanent and light fast... as well as fit the receiver requirements.
/pill thats been in a bottle for 4 years. Ink's not a drug (tho as expensive as cipro!) but it is used to print a photograph that will, if said photo should fade, be lambasted as a "cheap ass company" for producing a bad product (See http://www.wilhelm-research.com/ ... mind you I dont have a very high opinion of his work... but it's still a consumer 'start' ... he'll be re-inventing quite a bit of knowledge because he's refused help)
e gory=1246&item=6746041397&rd=1 - note I am not endorsing this seller or product, only that I'm currently contemplating buying it...)
And companies want to recoup that cost as fast as possible.
I worked on some yellow dyes and can tell you it's a very difficult process. Very expensive- you might have 6 months of failures.. and the floor lab might be stained a million colours.
But when it's done (and your scale up engineers have done it right) you'll get the cost of your ink way down.... I seem to remember some were down around 30$/kg. Pretty cheap. But that was the 'cost' of making the ink, not including all the $$ into research.
And being a chemist I can tell you inks in suspension aren't good after sitting for awhile. Yes, it's in a dark cartridge, but I don't know many people that will tell you it's safe to take a drug
Anyways.... this shouldn't surprise anyone that works with inkjets. The high-volume people will never see the problem, only the low volume people. And those that know will probably do something like this instead http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cat
Oh and he forgot:
4 - Get DMCA C&D notice from printer manufacturer
5 - Hire a lawyer to fight ludicrous claim in court
6 - Realize they have more money than you to throw at lawyers and give up the fight
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Unknown host pong.
Epson apparently does a similar thing with their printers as my brother fount out the other day.
At a predermined time (On time? Date? Droplets fired?) the printer shut down with the equivilent of an "Engine Check Light" and refuses to print. The driver brings up a generic error message about "serviceable parts are past their usable lifetime" even though the printer was working perfectly.
The printer is so old now that having it serviced is completely out of the question and given that new printers of much greater quality only cost $50, well...
Welcome to the peak of the throw away society! You no longer have to wait till normal, planned, obsolesence kicks in, electronic devices are now programed to fail!
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Me, I buy Canon inkjets. They've gone off in a completely opposite direction: Imagine a world where ink refill cartridges were little plastic containers that hold only ink, no 'chips', no replacing jets each time you run out of ink, no corporate attempt to dictate who you shall buy your ink and/or ink refills from. That's Canon Think Tank.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
It means that its stupidity is dependent upon the current position of the moon.
However, there are far more important things than exiry date for the useful lifetime. If you use the printer in a very dry area then the ink is far more likely to dry out quicker. If we're really to believe that HP is doing this to be nice to us, then I'd expect to see a humidity sensor.
It might be OK to tell the user that their cartridge has expired and let them choose to use it or not. Surely the choice is the customer's. Analogy: Milk has an expiry date. If you use old milk, that's your business. The milk company don't prevent you from using milk that's a couple of days past expiry (though maybe if they could figure out technology to do this they would).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Lunacris is the white rapper version of ludacris
However, it may not be so much as noncommitment, which is merely a lack of commitment, as an anti-commitment.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If the vendor makes it clear on the product that there is an expiration date, then there would seem to be no reason that they can't also enforce it by technical measures. I mean, when you buy a one year license key for a software product, you read and agree to the license that says that it will stop working after one year. If the consumable actually says that it will expire and stop working after 2.5 years (or whatever), then that's what it'll do, and this is what you are cogniziant of when you make the transaction!
There are some complications.
Firstly, if the time-expiring consumable is tied to the product and not available from any other vendor, there may be some sort of anti-trust issue here with "product tieing"; i.e. the vendor is trying to control the market more than is allowable: this is anti-competitive.
Secondly, if there are objective reasons for time-expiring, then the vendor may be okay: for example, if it can be shown that the the quality of the ink degrades to the point that after the expiration date, it would actually cause damage to the product it is used in. In this case, the vendor is making a fair and reasonable attempt to reduce damage caused by the item, which seems fair enough. Note again, there would need to be a provable reason for this, not just some kind of marketing spin.
Thirdly, it's a free market: if one vendor wants to offer a consumable with time-expiration built in, then there's nothing stopping other vendors from offer non-expiring products. As the consumer, provided you are given the knowledge up front (i.e. product labelling), it's then your free choice about which product you want to choose. There's no reason for the government or courts to step in and regulate this behaviour.
So without knowing a lot more facts, it's hard to understand what the exact position is here.
That's the spanish word for the lunar christ...
It's seeped its way into common use in the americas, as a general-purpose word, meaning anything so outlandish it can't be believable.
The south american lunar christ cultists have recently been dissolved (forcibly) by the argentine government, (see news relating to that), I'm sure they're satisfied that their diety will live on for awhile in popular language.
The primary lunacris cultist belief was that upon death, a man will rise to the heavens and join the lord in the Sea of tranquility.
From what I know of the cult, they were most popular in their founding country of Argentina, but they are still quite popular and active in Chile and Ecuador, with inactive members in some of the other South American countries.
I used to install HP Printers twice on machines. One for B&W and a second for color. HP drivers now prevent you from printing greyscale only. I spent hours on the phone with HP support, there is no way to do it on HP's newer printers. I am sure that this is to force people to use more expensive ink.
lunacris (n): 1. A crisis, during a lunar eclipse. 2. An alternative spelling of ludicrous, as seen on Slashdot. 3. Hewlett-Packard.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"The smart chip is dually engineered to prematurely register ink depletion and to render a cartridge unusable through the use of a built-in expiration date that is not revealed to the consumer," the suit said. When are the good ol' days when things were just said to be out of date and we can't be responsible after that date? FORCING a consumer to buy a new cartridge when it MAY be good even though this date is passed is basically forcing someone to buy a product that they already have. What if someone buys a bunch of these things to stock up and not worry about running out? A cartridge runs out, and the replace it, but the chip pops up claiming it's empty.. WTF?!
Empathetic-- 94% You tend to walk in someone else's shoes a hundred miles before pointing a finger.
My HP plotter has a "plot stamp" feature on it, that sticks the date, time, and our company name on every sheet we plot. Very handy when tracking things down.
So if we had an open-source alternative driver, things would be rosy? I don't know jack about building drivers, so is it even possible?
-1 Inane
Democratic way. How does democracy relate to our economy?
If a company breaks the law and makes me lose money, I have no other recourse but to sue them to recover my losses. Why would you even think that I would buy the products if they are a dishonest company. Of course I would no longer purchase from them. But you haven't resolved with how to deal with them breaking laws and cheating me out of money.
Asking for justice with in our system IS the democratic way.
The HP kill-the-cart.-after-one-year ploy bit a buddy of mine last year. Supposedly, the install date is burned into the cartridge chip when it is first used. Lexmark is rumoured to do the same thing. Changing the PC date won't work after the fact.
My friend was furious as his cart. was still half full and (was) perfectly functional the day before. He called HP and chewed a$$ mightily, to no avail. Neither one of us will ever buy a HP product again.
It was my understanding that the Lexmark lawsuite was peripherally in response to a 3rd party cartridge that had this feature bypassed or removed. Also - hacks do exist. Removing the offending system date calls from the driver (I think) is supposed to work.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
Did anyone else notice it was from the tin-foil-hat-brigade dept? That means, quite possibly, this is not true. Of course, with all the tinfoilhattery going about on slashdot usually, this will get me modded quite down.
The difference there is that you are talking about a glucose testing system that can and is affected by moisture on the test strips. Do you know what happens if your testing strip is horribly out of whack and you're a severe diabetic? Death from over (or under)-use of insulin. I belive a wrongful death lawsuit is a lot worse than a DMCA lawsuit. (well, this is the US. this may or may not be true)
"I guess now we know why printers are HP's last profitable division."
And, as soon as ink can no longer be sold for $8,000 per gallon (mostly cheap solvent, bought in tank car loads), HP will go out of business? (Also see this analysis about Epson ink: Comparison of ink in bulk to prefilled cartridges.)
If so, then HP has not been a real business for a long time, but has been merely piggybacking on the ignorance of its customers. And that means that Carly Fiorina was not a businesswoman at all, but merely good at giving the appearance of competence. And that, in turn means that people who write for the business press are completely incompetent, too.
Slashdotters should have a mission in the world, to provide at least minimal education to their friends and family and neighbors and political representatives:
Don't buy anything from a spam email.
Buy ink refills from Costco and refill Canon cartridges. (See this comment: 54 cents per refill.)
"If you'd read some of the linked-to articles, you would have discovered that HP provides an externally visible (outside of package), displayed expiration date of 2.5 years after "build" date and an internal "hard" expiration date of 4.5 years after build date. With the 2 years of HP printer ownership you've had, it's unlikely you would have run into the hard expiration date."
I didn't see anything about this in ANY of the linked articles in the summary...even regarding the Lexmark case (And since Lexmark != HP it would be irrelevant anyway)
Anyway, after checking my cartridges do indeed have a date printed on them which is in the ballpark of 2.5 years after I purchased them. My next question would be--where is the printer getting the date from? I'm not going to tear my printer apart looking for an independent battery but being a cheap printer I'd be surprised if one exists to maintain an internal clock of some type.
If it's getting the date from the computer, simply setting the date forward a few years would reveal whether or not there is a "hard" expiration date. After unplugging my printer's power and usb cable and setting the year to 2010, plugging it back in, and printing yielded a surprising result--a full color printed page!
"Hello. We're the Future Haters. We came back in time to call you a cracker." </chapelle>
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
They're doing what? That's an outra...
The older ( perhaps current ones too ) used to lock up with a 'service' error after a certian number of prints was reached.
It could be cleared if you knew the codes, but thae were not given out to mere 'consumers'.
Its still a scam, but its not new.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yeah, but that article's past its expiry date, dontcha know? ;)
HP should label these things to say "Cartridge Expires 30 days after use" or "Cartridge Expires after 11/25/05" to meet the truth in advertising ethic. If not, they are being unethical.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I experienced something similar with my Epson Stylus 9000 Color. The printer will report the cartridge as unusuable if you let it there for too long. Epson indicated that the ink degrades over time, yada, yada, yada. I discovered two solutions to this situation:
1. Short term: remove the offending cartridge, wait about 30 seconds, then re-insert the cartridge and run the head cleaning routine. The cartridge will probably work fine.
2. Long term: buy a printer that's on the Laser Monk's list (http://www.lasermonks.com). I've been buying their ink cartridges for a couple of years without problems. I'm about to buy an Epson Stylus R200 -- but I didn't spring for it until I checked that the Monks have the cartridges.
I hope this helps.
Cheers,
Eugene
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Consumers have a choice. They don't have to buy products that are engineered to prematurely become unuseable. Slashdot ran a similar story not too long ago about Monsanto offering seeds that were only useable for crops for a single season. If you want to become a subscriber/minion for a corporation, then you patronize their shit and their controlling schemes. Or you don't.
I urge EVERYONE to make sure they see the movie The Corporation and everything is put in proper perspective. (Torrent 1, Torrent 2.)
This evil device has 4 ink cartridges (black, cyan, magenta, yellow) and it will refuse to print if one of the cartridges is deemed empty. Now I never really print any color printouts, and yet, I keep running out of colored ink. I cannot seem to be able to print black and white without replacing the color. It goes through some sort of cleaning process every so often, and I think it just wastes the ink or something. Anyways, it claims these cartridges are empty even when they aren't! They haven't even been used to print anything! HP aren't the only thieves in the business. Something must be done, and I am glad to see this suit.
I recently had to bloody throw out 2x50$ AUD colour cartridges for the 9XX series of deskjets because the yellow simply didn't work. (both cardtridges)
Admitedly they were a little old but I wouldn't be surprised if this had something to do with the problem.
I was most un-impressed.
The US Army studied this because they were throwing away millions of dollars worth of medicines each year because of the expiration date. Results? They throw away far, far less meds now:
(From the cached version of Recycling expensive medications- why not?)So does my HP psc 950 all-in-one.
I phoned and complained to HP directly and they told me about an undocumented feature: hold down the start button on power up and it skips the cartidge check.
There are quite a few printers with internal batteries. I have no idea what they are used for, but I've seen them in more than one printer.
The on-cartridge chip in question is internally called the Acumen chip. It's really just a tiny ROM + FLASH combo storage device containing a few dozens of ROM bytes and a few dozens of re-writable FLASH bytes.
Encoded in ROM, among other info, is a "shelf life" or freshness date -- this is effectively the date of manufacture of the cartridge. If the cartridge is not unsealed and put into service within a certain number of months (something like 18-36 months I think), it will be deemed too old. The printer will refuse to use it.
The cartridges' ink reservoirs do lose moisture over time (osmosis and all that) and will eventually be unable to print as the ink's viscosity rises.
In addition, as an in-service cartridge is used, its osmosis rate becomes much higher. (It's factory applied nozzle tape has been removed, it sits docked in a relatively more porous "garage" when not printing, it prints sometimes and the nozzle then contact open atmosphere, etc.) The freshness date is thus shortened significantly once a cartridge goes into service. This new info is written to Acumen's FLASH area and checked from print job to job.
-----
In HP's defense, it is possible muck up the print head if old or sufficiently dried-out ink is passed thru the nozzles. For printers with permanent or nearly permanent print heads (you replace the ink supplies only, not the print head each time), this is a real problem. Using sufficiently viscous ink will actually kill the printer.
The reasons to do this on devices that use combo printhead+ink cartridges are less strong: you're typically not gonna kill the printhead (and thus the entire printer) because you throw away the printhead each time you run out of ink. You get a brand new printhead with each ink replacement cycle; this occurs [typically] well before the onboard ink becomes viscous enough to kill the attached printhead (unless your printer sits unused in an Arizona school house all summer...). You are, however, going to reduce the user's effective print-quality (PQ). PQ is something HP and competitors care dearly about. They basically don't want you to ever get a "bad" image. So they punt the cartridge when the ink is deemed old enough.
These design requirements lead the manufacturer to "freshness date" cartridges. I'm pretty sure Canon, Epson, Lexmark, and Tektronix (oops, Xerox) do the same thing.
I thought, "Wow. This whole thing is a big, stupid scam. I want a printer where I can buy straight ink and just re-fill the machine. Buying cartridges is for chumps. This is a big, giant rip-off and in a few years people are going to be screaming."
Then I thought:
"Of course, there are two levels at which people will put up with this bullshit; the business level and the personal level. --The business level is tighter; they can't afford to be pushed as far as individuals, and so they won't be. --The average office simply couldn't function if they had to replace ink cartridges every sixty pages! So it's better to buy whatever a medium-sized office would use rather than what Joe and Jenny Average want to put on their hallway desk. Spend the extra four hundred bucks and get a half-decent laser printer."
Boy was I ever right on that count. I go through maybe one toner unit every two years, (2500 pages, approx). --This is still a stupid rip-off, but it's better than having to replace a thirty-five dollar ink cartridge every month, (before tax!)
Back when the home office computer equipment market was still establishing itself. . . (Make good stuff to establish market share, then slowly start to suck.)
The HP Laserjet II was one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever seen. I miss that indestructible, ultra-reliable monster. Sigh. Back when HP was a good company which had ethics. I'm sure glad I don't work for them now! Their Karma is sinking fast. Must be a misery to be there today.
One of the worst things in the world you can do for your mental and physical health is to work for a company you don't respect. Imagine, a million people silently cursing you. .
-FL
So, my Epson R300 has ink cartridges that are just ink. However, it meters use, and assumes that a cartridge lasts for so many seconds at such-and-such coverage. Therefore, the cartridge can still have a fair amount of ink in it before it tells you to replace it, OR it can go empty before it tells you to replace it. I'm guessing they build in a pretty good fudge factor to ensure that it never goes dry.
Here's the stinker: most Epson printers will NOT let you replace the cartridge until it says it needs to be replaced. So if it tells you it needs to be replaced, and you just pop the old cart out and put it right back in, it will assume that a new, full cart is installed. Then when it DOES run dry, it won't let you replace it because it doesn't think that it's empty.
There's a workaround though: turn off the printer. Then look under the printhead carriage, there'll be a plastic tab that prevents you from sliding the carriage out to where you can change the cart. Just flip this tab forward, and replace the cart. Slide the carriage back, and turn on the printer. It won't even know that you've just changed the cartridge.
Since the cart is separate from the head, and the head isn't replaceable, it's probably a good idea to NOT let it run truly empty, as then you'll end up with air in the head that you'll have to purge.
I've got another gripe about inkjets, and they all seem to do this. If, say, your cyan has a blocked head, you can't just clean the cyan. You have to clean them all. This wastes ink from colors that don't need to be cleaned!
It's not cleaning the heads, it's cleaning out your wallet.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
I have an old HP DeskJet 697C which sat unused since March of 2001 in storage. I recently pulled it out, and wiped off the bottom of the old ink cartridges with a paper towel wetted with a bit of rubbing alcohol, and have now printed almost 100 pages with it on those ~ four year old carts.
It's not very hard to take an ink, purify it, dissolve it in Methylene Chloride, toss it into a powerful NMR ... and come up with a structure.
Then quick jaunt to the patent literature will help pinpoint any patented routes that are 'protected' to produce similiar compounds.
Finally, set up any graduate in chemistry to come up with a synthetic route.
Retool a pharmco plant or use (*if you care about quality*) some form of purification (membrane, recrystallization, solvent exchange, chromatography) and you've got an ink with no upfront costs.
I've been dealing with this problem for a while.
Some of my clients (generally small to medium buisnesses) use HP inkjets. More then once they've called me saying that they had just opened a new ink cartridge only to be told by the printer that it is expired, and every time the cartridge in question had been one that was kept on hand for a couple of months.
Also, this happened once with a computer that had the date set wrong. A perfectly working printer was plugged in and immediately the cartridges expired. Even setting the corect date wouldn't bring them back.
This is something that HP put in to the cartridges to combat all the ink refill kits. It's a real pain, too, since it means you can't keep any extra cartridges around as spares.
Forina didn't quit, she Expired, eh?
Table-ized A.I.
That is no defense whatsoever. As the one doing the printing, I decide what is an acceptable printout. There are a million reasons why you might print something and not give a crap whether the the quality matches the printer's theoretical maximum or not. You certainly don't subject my wallet to additional assrape to get that theoretical maximum either.
Incidentally, I've got a Laserjet 4M+ with more than a few miles on it. The last (used) cartridge I put in lasted three years before something failed in the cartridge and started dumping toner on the paper. I had another (used) cartridge handy and it has lasted over a year and a half to date. Needless to say, print quality (PQ) remains great.
These shady inkjet printer manufacturers can take their $30,000/gal ink, their half-filled chipped cartridges, their plasticky disposable printers, their business models, the lawyers they use to enforce said business models, and shove them where the sun don't shine. Sideways.
Even a good battery treated well only lasts a few years.
Actually, the printers are symptomatic of why HP has gone downhill.
... ... but more expensive, less reliable, and -- yes -- HP was starting to scam its customers. Remember the case of low-filling the cartridges for central and eastern Europe? I was there, using a pre-Carly Deskjet 5000 (if I remember correctly). Part of the reason I had gone with that printer, of course, was cost per page. That cost per page was what I call an advertised but nonbinding contract. They broke it.
Think Carly. The woman from lucent (of WinModem fame), hired to be HPs president, and (thankfully) now fired.
Essentially, when you start thinking of your business as a scam, then people start avoiding you. As a techie, I was aware of the problems the moment she came in to HP, and the other management scattered.
I therefore advised people not to buy new HP products. Shortly thereafter, HP quality *did* go through the floor, while their flash and spin went through the roof. Their printers suddenly were *streamlined*, *decorative*
Well, when it happened, I wasn't surprised; and the cost increase I could bear. But I'm not going to go back to HP in such a case, am I?
Nor did others.
Don't say that printers are HPs last profitable division. Rather, say that printers were HPs scam that sucked the profits out of all their divisions.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's