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HP Launches Ink Patent Violation Manhunt
BlueCup writes to tell us that Hewlett-Packard has deployed a large team consisting of many scientists and many more lawyers looking for possible ink patent infringement. With more than 4,000 patents on their ink formulations and cartridge design and a market share of more than 50 percent in the US HP depends heavily on the sale of ink to make profit after sometimes selling their printers at a loss in order to lock in the ink resale.
Hewlett-Packard has deployed a large team consisting of many scientists and many more lawyers ... [HP have] a market share of more than 50 percent in the US HP depends heavily on the sale of ink to make profit after sometimes selling their printers at a loss in order to lock in the ink resale.
Two days ago I was attempting to print a B&W document on my HP inkjet printer and it paused .. printed a line and paused .. then stuck. I form-fed the sheet it had stalled on and found
a large amount (at HP rates, about $4 worth) of ink pooled on the paper, as if it had taken a widdle and forgot where it was before this well-timed potty break. After cancelling the print job and powering down and up again the printer, I tried again. Same results. Perhaps they could explain why this is happening.
It's simple, sir, HP depend upon your regular purchase of ink and you haven't bought enough recently to ensure sustained profits. It's another of our patented business processes. Get out and buy some more, there's a good chap.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So, now HP needs to chase down violators to protect itself. If only HP had continued to pay attention to quality, maybe HP would not need to worry about this kind of activity.
Fifteen years ago, the only brand of printer I would buy was HP. Partly because HP was on point, but also because I'd always associated HP with quality as job one (actually, I guess that was supposed to be Ford). HP calculators, printers, electrical instruments, all quality products for years I'd faithfully used with trust.
Then came the second HP printer I'd ever bought, a deskjet, and I don't remember its model number. I do remember it suddenly either would pick up no sheets of paper for printing, or pick up 2 or 3 at a time. The fix?
I give HP credit, they did offer a fix. But it involved a scary piece of software and an even scarier piece of hardware with steel wool pads (I'm not kidding) you had to insert into the feed rollers -- and when all was done, you had a better performing (not perfect) printer and a heck of a mess to clean up. (Though I did get a free dental appointment once by bringing in my contraption and applying the HP "fix" to their HP printer!)
An anomaly?, a tiny blip on the radar? Nope. The next printer I bought, also HP Deskjet, fell apart so many times because of cheap plastic assembly I became an expert in the insides of the machine.
Still, I faithfully recommended HP printers to friends and family, but there were a disturbingly large and consistent number of "incidents" with these new printers. They were either balky in their performance, had ink problems, were virtually impossible to install, or keep installed. I gave up on HP about three or four years ago. Sadly, it's tinged my opinion of HP in general, from HP-UX, to HP-41X RPN calculators, probably unfairly since I think they still make some of the best electronics.
HP decided to go the route of making money on their printer ink, and sell their printers sometimes below cost -- that's kind of the disposable razor idea -- not necessarily a bad idea, but if it comes at the sacrifice of making reliable printers, I'm out.
HP's obsession with cost cutting, chasing down patent cheaters, etc., these are not the signatures of a class technology company.
So it was HP ink? Have you always used HP ink? I really don't think that's on purpose.
This just goes to show that software should not be paten... oh. Nevermind.
This is just lame. Desperation, not innovation. Why can't they just charge more for the printer? I'd pay more for a printer with better ink capacity and lower ink costs. The disposable razor IS a bad idea. It will only lead to crap like this.
. . . from my grubby ink-stained hands.
Um, seriously, I don't have the slightest sympathy for HP. Look at ad circulars from electronics places. If they have a sale or a coupon for ink carts, there's generally fine print at the bottom: "HP excepted."
Are we supposed to feel sorry for them?
Blerg.
I wish their market share would either reach monopoly status or dwindle into distant hopeful, but not niche status. If they were a monopoly, we could all band together and sue them into licensing 3rd party cartridges. If their market share dropped significantly, they would need a competetive edge, and probably at least reduce the price of their own cartridges. If they were a niche market they could keep prices artificially high due to lack of competition.
A friend of mine recently discovered that it was cheaper to buy her same model printer on sale than to buy a replacement cartridge for her existing printer. She couldn't bring herself to toss a perfectly good printer just to get the cartridge cheaper, but the temptation was there. I'll bet many other people don't have the same compunctions about this sort of waste.
...you prove you are more interested in litigation than innovation.
They giving one of them for every computer they sold and with almost every computer other company seld.
When I buy a computer, the one that come with a free HP printer is cheaper than the same computer without the printer.
I take the printer, print some picture, and when the ink are empty.. I got another printer.
Anyway, I have a cheap and good samsung laser printer for the real thing, and printer photo at pro store are cheaper than printing it at home expectaly with HP ink price !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
I hear the crack HP legal team has already filed lawsuits against several species of squid and octopus!
Really, could HP have more prominently declared that their traditional business model was failing miserably? After all, why try and provide a good or a service unsuccessfully, when you can just throw some patents around and generate instant income? The quality of HP products is no longer in question, because they've dealt their own credibility a far worse blow than any other competitor (or exploding battery) could ever do: they have consciously decided to invest in patent trolling, instead of spending that money on providing better products/service. Way to go, HP. Been taking business lessons from Sony?
So you want all patents gone?
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I met a traveller from a silicon land
Who said: Two life-sized cutouts of cardboard
Stand near Palo Alto. Near it, at 367 Addison Avenue,
Half sunk, a shatter'd garage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on a pedestal in Cupertino these words appear:
"My name is Carly Fiorina, queen of queens:
Look on my works, Bill and David, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, outsourced and bare,
The stock options stretch far out of the money.
Then there is the "egg yolk" test, in which Ms. Bell puts a drop of colored ink on a petri dish and places a drop of black ink from a competitor's cartridge on top of it. If the black ink forms a perfect black dot on top of the yellow dot, much like an unbroken egg yolk, a high-quality ink is indicated, perhaps an ink that infringes on an H-P patent.
This reminds me of something from the TV show CSI.
So . . . . if their competitor inks are high quality, then they're infringing? Sounds like BS to me. The electrophasis test sounds much better, but if failure to bleed means you're a criminal, I'll bet they've got some junk patents in the midst of their good ones.
Are you sure it was for the same size cartridge?
gas from a GM gas station. Ludicrious. My Epson uses a ton of ink just to clean the heads -- which is required constantly. If I used manufacturers ink, it would cost a dollar a page to print. I sometimes wonder if the cleaning process is designed to consume more ink.
Also print with the lowest print quality settings possible that still give you readable text!
What is interesting is that the replacement ink cartridge for Canon costs 67% less than the replacement ink cartridge for HP. The sales critter explained that the HP cartridge is actually integrated into a new printer head: the net is that you must buy both the replacement ink and a new printer head, resulting in the higher cost.
However, printer heads generally last a long time. In the long run, you will save substantial money if you buy the Canon printer.
The Canon printers must be hurting HP in less-affluent countries: Thailand, Eastern Europe, etc.
For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for HP.
Hmmm... selling their printers at a loss? Sound a lot like video game console makers ecrypting their systems to have total contol over users/consumers... even if you want to use one as a toaster!
Listen to X-Box hacker "bunnie" describe how everyone suffers from this type of greed in the new documentary "Alternative Freedom".
http://alternativefreedom.org/
Also features Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig and Dangermouse of Gnarls Barkley and others.
The only reason to use inkjets is if you got one free with your computer. And then use refill kits or off-brand ink (or toss the thing). And don't get me started on how stupid photo printers are.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
HP inkjet cartridges have built-in expiry dates (http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=9 220). This story dates back to 2003.
Proves 2 more things apart from the obvious.
1. I have good memory Still remember the story read in 2003 (But not enough courage, that's why I'm posting AC).
2. Google can find almost anything.
HP, Epson, Lexmark... I'm fed up with this crap. Which printer maker is not a patent-enforcing-drm-encoding bastard, so that I can toss out my current printers and buy theirs instead?
As for patent law, I guess HP are claiming that their method of making ink (i.e. by mixing certain chemicals in a certain way, or certain treatment processes) are sufficiently "advanced" they warrant protection. Specific rants about how screwed up patent law is can be left out at this point...
I dont know what worse, the fact that they feel they need a team of lawyers and scientists or the fact that they can create a monopoly with all these patents.
I often have trouble remembering which way is out of bed in the morning.
Just to screw HP, we bought replacement inkjets as they came on sale (which placed them cheaper than the replacement ink).
Then we started needing to do high quality work and switched to a Konica Minolta Magicolor 7450. The consummables are cheaper per page, and it even runs in Linux. Ever seen a printer with its own hard drive? It's just wicked cool.
We haven't looked back at HP since.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
HP basically has no choice. These days, there cannot be a consumer-grade, high-quality technology company. It's just not feasible with the current trend of globalization.
It starts with these companies shipping much of the work that was done in America over to Taiwan, or China, or India. Doing so puts American high-tech workers out of a job. Those same Americans, now without a job or working for far lower wages in some service-oriented job, can't afford to pay the price for a decent HP printer. So HP has to lower the price, and the only way they can effectively do that is by lowering the quality. Thus the only option they have to make their products affordable to the workers they just put out of a job is to reduce the quality significantly.
HP, and many of the other technology and manufacturing companies, have managed to gut the very market they depend on to purchase their goods. Many are betting on the Chinese and Indian markets making up for the losses in the American market. While that may be possible in several decades, it isn't the case right now. The vast, vast majority of Indians, for instance, have no need for the products put out by companies like HP. They'll manufacture those goods, but their social and business structures for the most part do not need items like printers or other trinkets.
The argument is not at all about whether it's "right" or "just" to outsource. Such discussion is largely irrelevant. What matters is the actual effect on the American economy of partaking in such globalization. And so far, it has been quite negative. As you have witnessed first hand, companies that prided themselves on high-quality technology have been forced to vastly lower that quality in order to stay competitive.
Any benefit to the populaces of India and China gained from the manufacture of these low-quality goods does not balance out the loss of quality in America. When American companies must spend more to maintain or repair the shitty equipment they're forced to buy (since quality equipment is no longer feasible to produce), it directly affects the ability of those companies to innovate, and further grow the economy. As we're seeing with HP, the a very good method of stifling innovation is participating in globalization.
Not to paint them in the worst light, but aren't these big companies just a little like Darth Vader's Empire? http://home.comcast.net/~plutarch/malfy.html
HP will have some chip on their cartridges that tells the printer if it's "HP" or not. You'll see it's coming!
The quality nowadays SUCKS. They seem to all be cheap, plastic pieces of shit that you must replace after a year when some tiny plastic piece inside breaks and is unrepairable. The ink also is a pain in the ass unless you do a whole lot of printing because if it sits for too long (in my experience a month or two) it dries up. The last ink jet I had was a canon and it went bad about 4 years ago and I replaced it with a used BW laser printer since most of my printing does not use color anyway. I am still using the same toner catridge that came with it 4 years ago and have not had a problem at all. I am probably going to upgrade to a used color laser printer soon since it would be nice to have the option of color and a used color laser printer can be had for not too high of a price. I will DEFINITELY NOT be going back to a color ink jet however.
I think the majority of people are soon just going to get sick of the shitty quality of the ink jets and paying the astronomical ink prices and they will look elsewhere too. I think in the next couple of years the only way ink jets will get into the market are when they are bundled with new computers and purchased by poor souls who don't know any better and havent experienced the poor quality yet.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
I was at the local Staples and asked a kid working there why there was no price on a certain HP printer. Apparently an HP rep had walked by there earlier that day and ripped off the price tag since he reduced the pricing given that they had a newer model so they were trying to get rid of the older model. He also increased the ink for that same model.
Talk about revenue maximization - short term at least.
So they are in essence selling ignorant consumers on "cheap" ink then jack up prices later on. They really need to be exposed. I believe in a market where consumers have all information, currently they do not have all information. I would wager that if people became aware of this, we'd keep HP honest. This should only hurt them in the long run, just be honest and it can only help you in the long run. It's only a matter before someone does an undercover expose of HP's tactics, then HP PR will work overtime while people switch to more trustworthy vendors.
C'mon 60 minutes, get to work on this one.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Who would want to use HP Ink? For most printers, it's overpriced, and if it clogs a print head, buy a new refilled one instead. (Most) HP Ink really doesn't have any advantage over the refill, both are dye-based, both smear when wet, the only real difference *might* be how true the colors are.
1. Patent the inks.
2. Patent a process to compare competing inks for patent violations.
3. Patent a process for extracting money from competitors for patent violations.
4. Piss off all of your customers.
5. Profit?
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
If I can get a new HP inkjet (obviously not top quality, but one that does the trick) for around $20, why should I pay $50 for a new ink cartridge? Common sense says get another new printer! I think they should be more worried about this fairly common mindset rather than whether or not patents are being infringed.
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I hope the octopus forms a large class action countersuit for prior art.
In all honesty, I have not bought a new cartrage in a LONG time. I usualy buy re-ferbished or no name ones from say staples. And as sad as this sounds, I ususaly get more out of these then I have over a brand new HP/Insert Other here cartrage. They may relay need ink sales, but yeash, at least be a little resanable with the pricing considering the cheep ones are better overall from what I have found.
especially since we don't compete with them in the inkjet market. I bought a BJ4000 years ago because it was listed as Linux compatible ( it was), nowadays, I buy the 2000's for $3.99 at Goodwill and Salvation Army stores, the cartidges are still compatible, and reasonably priced.
So rather than research how to come up with a better strategy than the sell the ink and give away the printer approach. They put their money into hiring scientists and lawyers and to go after small companies because they are selling ink for the printers. Whats next? Go after Epson because their printers kind of look like the ones we make.
This should be an episode of "The Office"
Maybe they can go after Walgreens for putting ink-refilling stations in all their stores. I hate those bastards.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Your story reminds me of my old HP Deskjet 500C. Reliable as a rock. Solidly built device. Had multiple buttons and indicator lights, not just an idiot light. Worked beautifully until I decided I was tired of switching out black and color cartridges since it only had room for one or the other. I should have just bought a 550C, which had both color and black cartridges at the same time, but I digress. When I was looking at replacements, I decided on the Deskjet 850C. Assumed that it would live up to the high quality standards of my old printer. It was, sadly, a complete piece of crap. Paper would get stuck in it, it would take multiple sheets, all kinds of miscellaneous feed problems developed. That and the ink was ridiculously expensive.
I decided, at long last, to go out and buy a laser printer, eventually settling on an HP LaserJet 1200. No color capabilities, but I didn't print that many photos anymore (so damn expensive with an inkjet!) and have been immensely satisfied. I still have the original toner cartridge in it from 2 or 3 years ago when I bought it. A new toner cartridge would be pennies on the dollar compared to what I would have spent on an inkjet these past few years. The printer has never jammed up on me or caused any problems, either.
Makes me wonder if now that color lasers are in the $400 and less range whether inkjets are going to fall out of style. I have had my eye on a Color Laserjet for a while now.
Bottom line is that inkjets are pretty much crap these days. You can't find a decent one that is solidly built and will last long enough to be worthwhile.
Turnabout, maybe not - Lexmark already tried to invoke the DMCA over the chips in cartridges. I don't see how ink is digital, and in any case, this is a patent issue, not a copyright one. The patents will be on specific formulation details of ink, not the concept of ink. I don't know enough about ink or their formulas to comment on the obviousness of a given formula, but you're achieving the impossible of underestimating the ability of patent examiners when you suggest they didn't notice this "ink" stuff wasn't a new invention.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Honestly, most of my printing is printing expense reports and airline ticket receipts; I do much "personal" printing. Why do people need to print that much? I gotta say that most of what people print is a waste. I've used maybe 3 printer cartridges in about 6 years. Now, I did spend a bundle to replace my print heads, but that is what you get when you buy a printer for US$50 on ebay when it retails for 200. But seriously, who in consumer world needs to print so much that they go through a significant number of ink cartridges in a year?
Stop wasting paper and stop printing people.
I always thought Epson were the good guys ? Do they suck now too ?
What about Brother ? They have some decent sounding models.
Why all the complaining? You expect a company to pay engineer to innovate, patent those ideas and NOT pursue infringement? What is the point of engineering if you are just going to let anyone come along and copy your idea?
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When my last HP printer crapped out on me, I was upset. Upon investigation, I discovered that the black cartridge had been leaking ink from its resting position for what must have been a long time. It clogged the gears and stopped the whole machine. The printer was also assembled in such a way that it could not possibly be opened without destroying it: they used some weirdly shaped screw heads and many places were snapped together, plastic into metal and such. Basically, I had only one option.
;).
My friends and I took a baseball bat to it Office Space style. We even played the appropriate music. Now I'm using an Epson and I feel great about my old HP
Esoteric reference.
Have two now, trashed a third. All have trouble printing at intervals. That is, it's often weeks before I want to print something in color again. Pretty much means a new cartridge or a cleaning expedition every time I want to print a page in color.
Besides, the HP software is horrible.
Anyone know of a good, reasonably priced, networked color laser?
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Why not do what Lexmark did and claim their cartridges as intellectual property, protecting it from tampering under the DMCA, thus making it illegal to refill?
sometimes selling their printers at a loss in order to lock in the ink resale.
Then there are those of us who would rather buy another $20 printer when we run out of ink, rather than shelling out $50 for an ink cartridge.
I love screwing HP. It's so easy.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
My primary printer is an HP Color LaserJet 2550L. While the lack of built-in paper tray sucks, the print quality is simply amazing. Bought it for 400$CAD more than a year ago. It was on sale because the new replacement model was coming soon, I guess. My secondary printer is also my fax machine. An HP LaserJet 3015. I've had both for more than a year and I've had no problems so far.
Inkjet printers? Forget about those. Companies sell them at cost (or even at loss) so you'll end up paying way more than laser (even color) in the long run. I've had problems with Epson inkjet printers and I'm never using inkjet again.
If companies priced inkjet printers correctly, everybody would be buying laser printers instead (as they should). I don't know where people live, but I see B&W laser printers on sale for about 150$CAD in lots of places. I even remember seeing one (Samsung?) for 99$CAD a few months ago.
HP are just pissed that others only supply kits because printer ink refills are absurdly expensive, totally out of proportion with what it costs to make them. Chipping their refills failed miserably thanks to EU laws on recycling so now they're trying scare tactics instead.
Even if we buy the idea that magical ink is 'better' HP and every other printer manufacturer goes out of their way and back again to create a slightly different cart for each and every printer model they make. Epson though I like them are horrible for this. Models in the same model family like the C82, 84, 86, 88 which are all essentially newer models of the same printer all use different ink carts. Lexmark? same thing. HP? Ditto and so on.
And guess what - just when people began all getting what are basically throwaway printers - ink jets you hope run a year year and a half, what do they do? Discontinue all the low end printers replace them with 'photoprinters' that cost 3x as much, the ink is 3-5x more expensive and they have all sorts of features you don't want or need in office printer. Unless of course you buy one of those piece of shit boatanchor all-in-1 devices that print scan fax copy all fairly poorly slowly and expensively and create a single point of failure for your whole home office.
It's not reverse engineering, but a valid scientific analysis to determine if a competitor has
stolen your formula, period. It's all part of due diligence and protecting your ass(ets).
I'm an HP retiree, but that's due to having worked a couple of dozen years for one of the
competitors that Carly just HAD to snap up - you all know that story. When we had our big
Merger Lovefest, the number of patents and the fact that they intended to protect them, was
prominently mentioned - and this was in May, 2002 !
So it appears that they've finally figured out that there may be a serious problem (i.e. the
only serious profit-maker is under the gun), and they're doing something about it. They certainly
aren't making any money in the enterprise space against Sun and IBM.
I'm still a bit amazed that they are supposedly losing money on the printers themselves,
given how cheaply they're designed to begin with, and built in southeast Asian sweatshops to boot.
(The duplexers are a different story - I'm *sure* they made plenty of money on my $80 duplexer
for the 3310 whose only metal part is small clip to short two pads on the back of the printer
so that the printer knows there's a duplexer installed. The rest is plastic and rubber...)
Their service is still dubious - plenty of ballyhoo on their web page telling you that Best Buy
and CompUSA are Authorized Service Points. Well, Best Buy won't service an out-of-warranty HP
printer that you didn't buy from Best Buy, much to my surprise - I'd think they'd JUMP at the
chance to earn some extra cash from someone who had a broken printer they could easily fix.
So, yeah, the disposable printer theory is still quite credible, but I'm glad I demurred on junking
a $425 All-In-One (that currently retails for $350) and managed to fix myself.
I just wish Brother's quality was a little higher - they seem to have their act together when it
comes to Linux support. HP's pretty good in that regard, but if Canon got on the bandwagon, it would
make things VERY interesting for me.
Crack, XTC, and most other street drugs are small change operations compared to the megabucks charged for HPs dark fluid.
HP Ink prices are outrageous, anyone who hasn't switched to another supplier or get refill cartridges is just burning their money.
This shouldn't be news to anyone in the industry that's been on the recieving end of their litigation. They have done this in the past to bankrupt small-time developer/marketers thereby consolidating their position. Adobe did it to Macromedia years ago.
This is a new kind of hostile business climate in America. The tax environment and regulatory oversight is certainly less than prior decades, but it seems the business environment is even more hostile with big business being able to easily dictate market conditions.
This is a perfect example where they are probably persuing remanufactured ink brands. Why? Because revenue doesn't flow to HP.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
2) Insurance (or lack of). A printer that costs $100-$300 is usually below most people's threshold to purchase insurance, but above their threshold to purchase a replacement should it break down (i.e. they'll try to get it fixed). A business operates with a larger budget and thus can afford to amortize the cost of failed printers over the purchase of new ones. A household often cannot, so the printer manufacturers are actually helping them out here by pricing the printers at $20-$50. That drops the price down to where a household can easily absorb the cost of a failed unit. (The cost of failed units is amortized over all the units and ink the manufacturer sells).
And the DCMA is American legislation, and also not valid outside the USA.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I swore off ink jet printers long ago. I don't do enough color printouts for it to be worth it to buy the latest piece of crap printer and put in an expensive ink cartridge that will probably dry up and clog before I use it next anyway.
I have a black-and-white laser printer with separate toner and drum, and if I want color, I take the files to the local print center and let them figure out how to get the cheapest ink.
Bought an HP printer for my wife's parents, checked the docs and bought some HP replacement cartridges to match so that when the initial half-size cartridges ran out, they could just swap in the full-size ones, no problem. Except that one of the cartridges that the flipping documentation says works in the printer, doesn't. $30-40 down the drain to buy a different replacement cartridge.
The bastards probably killed Kenny, too!
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
I heard once Ink was priced more than its weight in gold, however gold has been steadily moving up...and I am lazy to do the math.
/ 03/2037207
It does seem to be more than a good champagne: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07
Considering ink was one of mankinds first inventions, somewhere after the spear, fire and the wheel, basing/monopolizing a business on that is either pure genious or complete insanity.
HP depends heavily on the sale of ink to make profit after sometimes selling their printers at a loss in order to lock in the ink resale
So they are using lawery to enforce a broken business model. Why does that sound familiar?
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
HP Ink for a DeskJet model - $20 / 11 milliliters = $1.82 per milliliter
Dom Perignon - $145 / 750 milliliters = $0.19 per milliliter
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
...I'd be somewhat concerned about my investment in a company that derived 80% of its profits from selling a grossly overpriced, relatively unsophisticated product, i.e. printer ink. At least Kodak, before its high-profit film business was crushed by the digital camera revolution, produced a product that was a little more difficult to manufacture.
Last time that happened to me, I just took it back to Office Depot (and it was a big honkin $80 laser toner cartridge too). I was prepared to make a big scene in order to make them take it back, but they just let me grab the right model and let me be on my way even though the merchandise was already opened. Props to Office Depot for that one.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
"...a high-quality ink is indicated, perhaps an ink that infringes on an H-P patent."
It's called reading comprehension. More like basic literacy, actually. Come to think of it, how completely obtuse do you have to be to not understand the word "perhaps"?
Deliberate misinterpretation would be another possibility, I suppose, except that you strike me as too thick-skulled to be capable of such underhandedness, even with such excruciating unsubtlety.
Isn't this reverse engineering illegal under the DMCA? All the companies that get sued by HP should counter-sue under DMCA!!! Now, considering that "ink" is over 5,000 years old, how is it even possible that "ink" is a patentable invention?
IANAL but follow IP stories very closely. Actually DMCA applies to copyright protection not patents. You can go to jail and sued for breaking copyright protection, which is what DMCA is about, modifying or writing software that decrypts and/or unprotects protected medium containing copyrighted content (such as movies, music, writing and art). DeCSS is an example of software that broke the DMCA laws.
You only get sued for violating patents. I'm pretty sure that all they can do is sue you for whatever amount license fees they define, as well as punitive damages for not playing nice and paying them up front. Basically they sue for enough to shut you down unless you settle, if they even want to settle. HP will probably just want to shut everyone down.
Further DMCA is really only enforceable by the companies that paid congress for it, since the litigation is so expensive. For the same reason it's impossible for ordinary people accused of breaking it to fight it without selling their house.
Plead guilty and take your lumps unless the EFF takes your case on pro-bono or something grand like that.
-AC
I don't use HP Inkjet printers any more. I used to have a HP 712C, every time I would print something the CPU resources would stay at 100% till the print job was done. Also I always seemed to run out of ink half way through the print job. Now I use an old HP Laserjet 4+, a good old reliable work horse. Plus a new toner cartridge is about the same price as HP's over priced ink and prints about 20 times more pages between toner cartridge changes.
If I need something printed in color I just print it out at work on a color laser printer or take it to Office Depot.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
If company A can patent fluid mixture #1, why can't company B patent fluid mixture #2?
"company A" = HP
"fluid mixture #1" = inkjet ink
"company B" = Calvin Klien
"fluid mixture #2" = perfume
Buy another brand that doesn't use this kind of business practice to keep the customer. At one time there was such a thing as pride in making a good product but now if the bottom line drops a bit then out come the lawyers. I try to find the least objectionable company to purchase products from (he says sheepishly as he looks down at his HP keyboard).
I didn't know they had separate cleaning cartridges. Thanks, I'll try that.
What a lot of people do is look at the price of the inkjet, look at the slightly higher price of the laser, and pick the inkjet "because it has color and is cheaper". Then they run into ink hell, and figure that's just the way it all works.
Personally I've never bought an inkjet because I've always thought the technology sucked. I now have a used HP LJ 4 I got for $20, and bought a toner cartridge for $50 and replaced all the rollers/pickups. It runs like a champ and since I do light printing I expect it to last as long as I care to own it. Like you I might eventually upgrade to a used color laser, but only if it's really cheap as I don't really care about color.
AccountKiller
Having studied mostly substances that cause cancer, she was surprised that the company wanted her to study something entirely different: ink.
Oh great now we're not going to get a cure for cancer as she's studying how to make HP more money in ink
I just want to know why you have to download a 280mb file to install a freaking driver? All the old printers have mb driver you can find on their site. Any of the printers / scanners have some HUGE freaking download. You install it and get the AWSOME share to web feature installed on your computer. Hell I just bought a xerox that does everything but give you a bj. The installer was like 25 mb. (still a bit big for me) All i gotta say is untill they get their act straight and quit pumping out crap like that. I will stick to my old ass hp 2200's and 4000's I got now.
MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
whatever happened to competing on quality and service?
The whole patent game has become an artificial playground of the attorneys. They're the only ones that have nothing to lose and everything to gain by this mess. It's seems more and more like the legal profession has evolved into a mesoamerican high priesthood, holding sway over over our lives because they've convinced us they possess the language and reasoning ability to settle questions of rights and ownership. And the more complex the system can be made, the more secure their position.
Reminds me of Microsoft's Windows API.
A revolution is in the offing, I swear.
If you post it, they will read.
We bought a Brother HL2040 Mono laser for about $100 with shipping. I think the cartridge that comes with the printer is rated at 1000-1500 sheets (don't specifically remember) and the replacement $50 toner cartridge is rated at 2500 pages. Thats about 10 cents a page for the printer and initial cartridge and 2 cents a page for the replacement cartridge. Plus the toner doesn't dry out!!! Printing 300+ pages was completed in less than 1/2 hour. Good deal so far!
Who even needs to print? I have a dumpster-dived 930c that's had the same set of catridges for 3 years. I print maybe 2 pages per month, airline e-tickets are pretty much it.
If I actually ever need to buy new cartridges I'll just email PDFs to the local Kinkos and pay them 50c per page to print it there, it's cheaper.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
1. Get a job
2. Use your employer's printer whenever you need to print something
3. Save yourself the frustration
4. Profit!
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I have owned many HP Deskjet printers and I can tell you that the print head has always been part of the ink cartridge.
Oh, and the only hp printer that died on me was a 697C but it was 8 years old and had printed many thousands of pages. The rest I gave to family and friends and, as far as I know, are still working. Still using my 9 year old 722C which is a real workhorse, just like the 500C I bought in '91 and gave away 10 years ago.
Supposedly, HP sells some printers at a loss, thus justifying exorbitant prices for these printers' ink. I ask: is there any supporting evidence that HP does indeed sell these suckers at a loss, or is this just a line HP peddles (and most seem to accept) so that it can get people to feel good about paying big bucks for little cartridges of ink?
Is there anywhere we can look to see an authoritative breakdown of HP's profits and losses on individual printer lines? Or do we just nod and say OK when HP claims to sell at a loss.
I'm a former HP inkjet owner, who now is more than happy using a Brother b&w laser printer - not a solution for everyone, but works extremely well for me.
I'm a chemist for a company that makes formulations for the papermaking, mining, and oilfield industries, and I do a lot of work analyzing chemical patents. After reading this article, I see two cases: one full of BS and one that msy sctually be legit.
a tic_Control_Components), but Lexmark sued on the basis of copyright and DMCA violation, not patent violation. You mechanical, electrical and computer engineers in the audience can talk about this one better than I can.
Case 1. HP suing people for violating their "cartridge design" patents. Without hearing anything else, this sounds like HP's suing people who make replacement cartridges that fit their systems (including any chipping), which sounds pretty low. We've seen this once with Lexmark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int'l_v._St
Cases 2. HP suing people for violating their ink formulations. (All that stuff about using GC, the "egg yolk" test, etc.) Here HP may not be full of BS. Inks aren't as simple as you might think -- they are highly engineered formulations that must disperse into tiny droplets for spraying by the ink jet, they must not bleed, they must not fade in light, etc. This is on my turf, so I'll lecture for a bit.
The inks are made from specific combinations of pigments and dyes, which could have been used for centuries or been made in a lab last week. The dyes and pigments are then mixed with other chemicals that will disperse them in a solution and keep them from settling over time. The pigment, dye, or dispersant can be a new chemical substance and granted a material patent. The specific combination of ingredients, including how they are mixed together, can be granted a process patent.
Unlike software patents, the patents in the paragraph above cover tangible things (pigments, dispersants, dyes, and formulations). They can be circumvented and you can prove if you are infringing or not with some straightforward lab tests. Some simplistic examples: If HP has a patent on an ink that is 25% A, 50% B, and 25% C, I can sell an ink that is 50% A, 30% B, and 20% C and not infringe. If the dye molecule in HP's material patent absorbs at 590-610 nm and the dye molecule I sell absorbs at 550-585 nm, I am not infringing. Smart companies change the competitor's formula just enough to avoid violating patents, while being able to have approximately the same performance.
HP may find people copying their patented chemicals or formulations and prosecute them to he fullest extent of the law. They may find instead competing companies coming out with similar but noninfringing products at a low price that the consumer actually likes. In that case, hopefully the market will clear things up instead of a bunch of suits.
(Of course the cynic in me thinks they'll still sue the people who are not infringing their material or process patents in the hope of intimidating them.)
For shame! You must work in accounting not in IT, huh?
I hope you get busted and lose your job.
BlueCup seems to have forgotten to give credit to The Wall Street Journal for the information presented in this post. Wall Street Journal Online subscribers can read the complete article here.
I purchased an Okidata microline 590 way way back in the early 90's. I still use it for all my black and white printing. This Printer has worked flawlessly for years and has followed me from computer to computer just like a faithful dog. Not only is the paper cheap but at 4 million characters per tape refill which costs a whopping 8 bucks. There is just no way you can beat it for efficiency.
IF you can't be famous be infamous. But for GODS sake be something
If you were using something like indigo, you would be using a perfectly legal, public domain ink - one of the ones in the "5,000 years old" category. However nowadays much research and development goes into creating new inks. I worked at one such company's research centre, let's call it Company X, for one of my co-ops. Creating a new ink was serious business. So hopefully this can be an overview of what I learned.
In order to create a "clone" ink, you have to match the colours, as most printers are designed to use a certain colour space, which must be matched by the inks used - a mismatch of colours means that your photos won't look quite right. Certain chemical structures absorb light at different wavelengths, and have different absorption patterns. You need to match it very closely, otherwise a Brand Name print and a Knock-Off will look different depending on the light that it is viewed under (Fluorescent vs Sunlight & Incandescent lights). The easiest way to do this is to match the structure of the dye very closely, or at least by finding a related dye that has the same absorption spectrum. Furthermore, the ink has to stick to the surface well enough, be fade-resistant (i.e. not break down with exposure to sunlight), and ideally easy to make. The chemist's job is to design and make said new dyes so that the new dye molecule - and just as importantly the process used to make it - can be patented.
Formulations are another part of the patent. I don't know if you've ever smelled the difference between a Canon brand ink cartridge and a clone (I get mine from piloshop.ca), but they smell very different. Piloshop's ink reeks of what I am fairly sure is ethylene glycol (the price of cheapness). Not only does one have to match the colour with the right chemical dye (or combination of them), one must also make sure that they are properly dissolved, dispersed, have the right consistency, and so forth. Bad formulations lead to ink that chips off, or steaking on the page. This is much like the pharmaceutical industry where it is not just the drug that you use, but what other things you throw in to make it work and be absorbed by the body. (E.g. a certain widely-used drug is sold as the citrate salt to make it work better.)
As for violating the DCMA, you've forgotten what the D stands for: digital. This is chemical. And every company out there is testing their competitor's chemical products. Whether it's a battery company, a drug company, or a plastics company. Every product needs a benchmark, and chances are it was made by the other guys. It can actually be quite simple to find out what some of the chemical components are, however the beauty of what HP's chemists have done is that they've managed to create a simple fingerprint-type comparisson test that uses a relatively small amount of dye. And at a dozen dyes a week, it sounds like it works well.
was at Fry's Electronics recently ... The sales critter explained that the HP cartridge is actually integrated into a new printer head
A Fry's Salesmonkey who actually knew something technical about the equipment, and correctly stated that information to the customer?
Where was it? And what was the salesperson's name? We must contact the store, as this person obviously needs to be fired!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I've found Canon to be the best $/page of the printers out there and they are as good as HPs. The fact that they split the colors into seperate carts unlike HP which puts them into one means that you don't throw out colors with plenty of ink left. Unfortunately Canon now puts chips on their new lines of ink carts (i.e. my Pixma 830 uses CLI carts) so they can DMCA themselves into a chokehold on the Canon ink market. Thanks guys!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
More than 4000 patents only on inks and cartridge designs probably means more patents for all ink types HP sells times all cartridge parts times all inkjet printer models they make.
How many of these patents are real innovative products that will hit the market and how many are just protective patents that exist with the only purpose of eliminating any competition?
Call me a free software hippy + patent hater zealot, but if it turns out that some company is getting hurt by HP lawyers because they used some patented ink or part that HP never intended to market, then this would show that the patent system must be reformed at any cost.
You know how HP encourages you to "recycle" your print/toner cartridges? As if they give a toss about the environment. They want the cartridge back so they can refill it with a tenth of a cent worth of toner and sell it for $80. As far as I'm concerned, they can have it back. I dutifully return the old cartridge to them with their pre-paid UPS label . . . after taking a 12ga shotgun to it. "Here, refill THIS, assholes!"
I had an Epson printer for a while, and it sucked ass with a huge sucking noise.
Did you have the Bubba Ho-tep model?
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Lexmark X1185 printer-scanner: $59. Black and color cartridges: $72. My family often buys a new printer instead of new ink in order to save money, and damned if it don't work.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
HP wants to charge $15 for 5ml of black ink (92 is the "serial" for the ink) for the printer I just got.
What the hell?
When you can't compete with them -- sue 'em!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have a LaserJet 6M I purchased about 3 years ago after getting fed up with an inkjet printer I had. I bought it used for $120.00, and purchased a refilled toner cartridge for another $70.00 - I still haven't run out of toner. Not too long back I found a LaserJet 5MP at Goodwill (with paper, toner and postscript SIMM!) that I purchased for $15.00 (!!) - it works great, too. I added a postscript SIMM to my 6 along with some spare RAM SIMMs to beef up the cache, and it hums away perfectly.
It currently sits on the parallel port of my wife's machine, which runs Mandrake with CUPS (she uses it the most). I can easily print to it over the network from my Linux box. At some point in the future, I have a network printer buffer (similar to a JetDirect) I am going to attach it to, then it will be truely independent.
I love this printer and I encourage anyone who needs to get work done (and doesn't need color) to go out and get one of these workhorses. You won't be sorry, and you won't be shelling out wads of cash for printer ink ever again!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Unless things have changed there is a cost problem with a color laser printer, and that problem is the toner cartridges. Depending on how much color printing you do, and how "uniform" the color printing you do is, you could end up in the bad situation of having to replace not one, but three to four toner cartridges. Since most of the toner cartridges today have an integrated drum (which is a good thing), you can probably expect to pay $150-300.00 (at the outside maximum) when you have to change toner cartridges. If you only change one or another, you could find yourself running out again on one of the other cartridges, or with color mismatching (as others are lower and spread out wrong versus the filled ones), etc. If you can afford it, great, but keep it in mind if you go that route - your printer might be cheap (if you get lucky and find one used for $20 like your LaserJet), but the toner might eat you in the end (however, depending on the smarts of the printer and how much you do color printing, they may last for years as well - so the money will still be worth it). For myself, I only do B&W printing using my LaserJet 6MP - if I ever need color (has yet to occur in the 3 years I have had the printer), I will do it at work or take it to a Kinkos or something...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Why not just buy a color laser? They are fairly cheap these days. I have a color laser, and a sprinkling of B&W lasers. I pretty much only use the color laser. When I have the need to do pure B&W, I use the older lasers, but in general I forget t change which printer it prints to.
I'll probably get a photo grade colour printer and a laser printer. This is the printer I bought with my laptop back in 1999. It still prints very nicely, but these bouts of paying the Ink Tax are getting on my nerves.
I'm perplexed how my original post was modded Funny. I suppose it may read that way to some, to me it wasn't a terribly funny experience, perhaps due to its recency. I may laugh about it next week. I'm also wondering how someone saw it as flamebait.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
HP use to make some good products. Clearly they are going downhill and perhaps we should be looking to short the stock.
Suing people for making ink is pretty lame when they could simply put the HP32s calculator back on the market and make money doing something useful supplying a product people really like.
Sure I'm on a rampage. My HP32s quit when I tried to install wine. (www.winehq.org)
I don't know how HP got ahold of his patents!8-))
They weren't doing anything about the ink under DMCA. They started including chips in the _cartridge_ to *cough* monitor *cough* toner usage for an empty condition. This included a methor of "re-enabling" the cartridge only when refilled by Lexmark themselves. A third party figured out how to replace the chip with another one. So Lexfuck did a simple-ass encryption on the chip code. This allowed them into the DMCA tent so they could go after the producers of the new chips on the basis of "circumvention" of the encryption. The bloody fucks prolly used ROT13 for their encryption.
Serious I actually like quite a few HP printers but I avoid them like the plague. Only if they would offer reasonably priced printers without lockins would I ever look at them again. It's all about TCO baby...
FYI, The big drivers are part of the anti-counterfiting stuff. The big driver examines what you are scanning or printing and looks for the constellation in the yellow channel. It's a feature of most scanners and printers that do more than 300 DPI printing. It's designed to keep your school kids from printing dollar bills to use in the school vending machines.
The truth shall set you free!
I got the last good printer HP made I think
.DEAD.
Deskjet 832C
Purchased it at Wal-Mart in 1998 for around $200, and I've got about 20 cartridges and easily a pallet of paper through it, and aside from lubing the one metal bar once when it started squeaking 3 or 4 years ago, it just works. Perfectly.
The HP multifunction i bought 2 years ago. . a TOTAL POS.
Both the black and color cartridges on the el-cheapo multifunction Lexmark I bought a 1.5 years ago are running low. For the same amount of money as a set of cartridges, I'm very tempted to pick up a newer model, and probably a different brand. Why? I'm only marginally satisfied with the scanner in my model, and I think I can do better. Besides, I'm sure I can find a friend who will take the older unit off my hands, if only for the scanner.
The printer was bought primarily for the scanner functions, the 99% of printing goes to the 8 year old laser. In the end, I'll probably try my luck at refilled carts...
Separate ink tanks are also easy to refill. Do a bit of research first, though, some of their newer printers have the integrated ink tank/print head setup that does nothing but add to your costs when you discover that only one color is empty and you've got to cough up the money anyway for a new printer cartridge.
I once had an HP Series II laserjet with the original Canon laser print engine. Built like a tank, and about as heavy. And solid. And reliable. Too bad the HP that made that printer is for practical purposes, no longer around. The HP of old was strangled by the bean counters and marketeers. All that's left is a once-proud name.
HP's attempt to suppress third-party ink competitors is just another good reason to avoid HP printers, and anything else HP makes, particularly including servers and workstations. (other reasons to avoid the workstations, e.g. drive partition "backup" instead of an install CD)
Tech Public Policy stuff
[Working at staples at the moment.]
:P
Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head example.
The HP Deskjet 5440 and Deskjet 5940 look identical, bar the latter having a metal top as opposed to white plastic. The former is £59, the latter £69.
The former has 5ml cart's that cost about £13 each (336)(black).
The latter has 21ml cart's that cost about £24 each (339), and 11ml carts that cost about £19 each.
The two are sat right next to each other on the shelf, and a customer that looked through the spec sheet would see two printers with similar speed, the same resolution, and an pictbridge port on the 5940. If I don't point the difference out to them, they will buy the cheaper 5440.
As you can imagine, I'm very quick to point out the difference. Hell, I don't get commission, there's an extra £10 in the till (the bean-counters don't see past today) and I'm less likely to get a complaint about the consumables running out every two bloody minutes.
Instead, they'll run out every eight.
If you're buying HP, take a moment to spin the box around and check sizes and prices of the cartridges BEFORE you buy.
Was a 932C back in 2000, this after my 695 died a horrible death while trying to print out 10 copies of my 100+ page Master's Thesis without a break... I only use it for color needs and photos as I have a nice Oki B4200 "laser" printer for B&W stuff... oddly, that little Oki, which was $239 when I bought it, has gone through 5000 pages w/o needing any maintenance whatsoever, or even a new toner cart for that matter. With inkjets, they have you buying ink about every 300-400 pages, so I would have gone through over $300 in ink on the 932 by now. I'd say the laser printer has paid for itself...
Toner carts for the Oki are only about $30, too...
E
I don't print much though, though the cartridges sometimes run out of ink. I keep a set of spares. I just take the empty down the road to our local refill shop and get it refilled for about a quarter of price of a new cartridge. HP are out of luck with their manhunt though. The work is done by an awfully nice LADY.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
AFAIAC, this was a rip-off scheme to begin with. Selling underpriced printers and ripping you off with the ink. So, I don't really care about the outcome of this particular stunt.
I set up Mac-on-Linux (MOL) to run Canon's proprietary driver in OSX and export the printer to the network from the MOL virtual host. (MOL makes that all fairly easy.) Now I can print from any host on the LAN. The only drawback is that I need to have both the physical and virtual hosts up to print. Right now I do that manually, but I am working on running MOL at boot time so I only need start the physical machine, which is what I would have to do even if there were Linux drivers for the printer.
I haven't tried running the Windows driver (since I have a Mac hardware), but I am pretty sure one could also set up an x86 emulator, such as Qemu, to run the proprietary Canon driver in Windows to achieve the same effect. For all I know, it might work better. I'm not sure how easy it would be to export the printer to the LAN, but I suspect it would involve Samba.
Sure, it was a pain to set up, but it works and works well. Long term? I probably won't buy another Canon unless they start supporting open source drivers like they used to. HP and Epson still support open source drivers, but HP seems to be taking a beating for reduced quality, judging by the comments above. Fewer comments seem to condemn Epson's quality so that is what I will likely buy the next time. Either that or I will finally save up for a postscript laser printer.
I've heard somewhere recently that printer ink is the most expensive liquid on earth. Is it true?
And I usually buy an extra black toner before I run out of the color. I'm just about to switch printers now. The good thing is that the unit degrades in quality fairly quickly, so a whol enew unit after a full set of toners is probably a good thing.
I've got a Dell 5100 color laser as well that I picked up on sale for $680 new - networked, duplexer, 25/35ppm rated (about 10-15 in real life for large color jobs), comes with full 9kB/8kCMY toners. 9k black toners are $50. The down side is that 8k color toners are something like $175 each, and the fuser is another $300, so - once again - when the color runs out, I'm buying a new unit. Well, maybe not a new 5100cn, 'casue the out put is "fuzzy" when compared to a good HP.
Oh, my workhorse is an HP5siMX. $250 off of ebay, plus $125 to ship the monster. Prints all day, all night without a problem, and it's $15 for a 15k toner refill. Swap the toner cart with an OEM or reman one every other (or third) fill for $90. It's so cheap to print on, and so reliable, I will be sad the day it dies or I replace it (might get a xerox multi-function this fall to replace it...I need 11x17 copying).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yeah, but last time I reprinted my pictures with Dom they were pretty washed out. On the other hand, last time I drank the ink it left a nasty stain on my chin and really didn't taste as good as the dom either. Why do people insist on comparing two completely different products in terms of price.
Why not compare quality+price of HP and competitor replacement inks instead?
Yes, that's why I said the Lexmark case was about the chips... I used it to provide contrast to the current case, and the suggestion the DMCA could be used to fight back; I wasn't suggesting that these (ink not digital, ink patented not copyrighted) are the reasons that Lexmark's case was flawed.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Sadly they bribed it in as an EU directive as well.
How come when it comes to copyright, the only way to "harmonize" is in the wrong direction?
Anyway, the EU flavour of DMCA is called EUCD.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Copyright_Directi
I took apart an Epson to find a large ink depositing place filled with cotton to keep it from leaking out. Everytime the carterage goes over to park, a little ink gets sucks out and put in this cotton ball thing(2in wide about the length of the printer, 1/2in high). It was almost filled after 2 new ink carts. Thats is where the ink goes. The HP deskjets do the same thing. 40$ fucking $ worth of ink in this printer still.... wasted.