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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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)
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)
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.
"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.)
"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...
Yeah, but that article's past its expiry date, dontcha know? ;)
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.
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?)Better yet, they should come to my house and remove the old milk when it expires. They should show up a few seconds before it expires and remove it from the refrigerator, or my hand, just as the expiration happens. That's a valuable service and I would expect people to pay extra for it.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
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.
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.
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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.
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.