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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is happening with all printer makes. I used to trust Epson printers - our C42UX is a complete joke. The heads clog all the time, and all printouts are for some reason "dirty", with smears and marks all over them. It *feels* cheap. The supposedly premium Xerox at work has bugs in the print system that cause image corruption, colour "correction" that fixes photos to give people bright red faces, jams if you try to print forms on it (using regular paper), and a display that's supposed to report how far a print job's done, but always reports you're on page 0.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
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!
secondly... I was under the distinct impression that formulations were not patentable, only methods of manufacture...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Inkjet printers are shit. They've pretty much always been shit, they will continue to be shit. It's the zen of printing. I've owned Epson's, Canon's, and I work on HP's for a living. HP is the best of a bad lot in inkjets. They're all cheaply made disposable electronics, plain and simple. There are no servicable parts outside of the cartridges and maybe, if you're lucky, the print head. So building in the level of quality a consumer should expect just isn't cost effective anymore. Oh how I wish it was....
Now, when it comes to lasers, HP still makes some decent kit. But it's not 1993 anymore. You can't buy a full size Laserjet 4 and expect to run it for the next 12 years. But their big iron is still the class of the market. I've got 4050's and 8100's that have run in the millions of pages and are still faithfully chugging along. Even the smaller laserjets (the 1300 series in particular), while a royal PITA to work on, are for the most part are relieable. That's more than can be said for Lexmark, Tally, or any of the other builders. There have been debacles (Ever seen a laserjet 1100? Actually, ever seen a laserjet 1100 that's not in the process of being thrown from a rooftop?), but they're still the class of the industry, like it or not.
I am just a bit sad that I think of HP as "the printer guys." Back in the day they were all about innovation. we're having good luck with their switches, maybe there's still hope.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Couldn't agree more regarding inkjets in general. I was getting sick of spending $100/yr in ink easily (only expected to increase as kids advance in school), constant head cleaning operations (using more ink!), and calls from home while at work over printer issues.
I resigned to buying a laser - even at the loss of color. Then I discovered that color lasers are now affordable - I was shocked to be able to buy a Dell color laser for $300 shipped (no tax). Toner should last about as long as the printer at the rate we print - we have photos printed at walmart since it is generally cheaper and quality is superior. Only a few cents per page even in color.
Inkjets don't make sense any more - sometimes you have to spend money to save it - and you don't need to spend all that much...
My $99 Samsung ML-1710 uses $40 of toner per year (that's $80 every two years)
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
I used to recommend HP to all my customers and even family and friends, but that changed about a years ago, when my expensive HP 2000c colour printer, refuse to print.
After investigating I found out that the HP cartridges have a chip that records the installation date and regardless of the ink levels will stop printing after x months.
This really anyone me, I felt that HP were stealing my hard earned cash, by stopping me using the full level of ink in my (property) cartridges. Being in the UK I resorted to throwing the printer in the rubbish rather that pay £100+ for 4 colour cartridges.
Later on I found out that in the USA there was a class action law suit against HP by consumers that felt the same way I did.
I didn't manage to follow this up but only hope that the consumer wins. As far as I am concern, this was my last deal with HP stuff, since the HP must have lost hundreds of thousand of pounds as i have stop purchasing HP kit for my employer and any private business that I do.
My Dell 3100cn works great and was on sale for $300 shipped. Did well on reviews and cost per page is 1.5/4.5 cents (BW/Color). Networked and handles PCL 6 - didn't advertise PS but it actually seems to work for me (unless CUPS is translating). In any case, got it working with linux which is no small feat in general (foomatic is about as easy to set up as it sounds like it should be)... :)
Really designed to be a workgroup printer and it is a bit large, but the footprint isn't really all that much larger than my old inkjet (slightly narrower, barely deeper when you consider the paper output path on an inkjet that must remain clear, and WAY taller).
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.
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
I do like the low end Samsung printers. I gave an old one (13something) to a friend and it had a full toner cart. They don't make toner carts for it anymore but at the rate she's using toner I expect it to be empty in about 5 years.
BTW All the Samsung printers work on Linux and OS X too. You can use the drivers from Samsung or the gimp print.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
They may rock in the workplace, but I personally won't use one in a more confined space (like, say, a home office) due to the toxic emissions they create. Especially with small children in the house. I'd rather pay for the difference with money, rather than my health!
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
HP offered a fix, which was really just a couple of somewhat flimy stickers you put inside the printer to apply more pressure to the rollers. Frightening, but they did the job. Unfortunately, the kit is no longer available as the settlement has run out. But there is a better alternative. Take it from a satisfied customer.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Paying $20 means you paid only 40% of the $50 for a full ink cartridge. This means that if you get a cartridge that is 40% full, you have broken even by buying a new printer. If the cartridge in the new printer is greater than 40%, you have actually come out ahead. HP knows this and equip their new printers accordingly.
HP loves screwing their customers. It's so easy.
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.
In my experience, IT workers are much more likely to steal toner. Why? Because they have the access. At my company, we lock down the toner. EVERY empty cartridge, box, etc must be accounted for. Usage is tracked -- when I turn in an empty to get a full one, it gets noted in the usage file... any anomalies are investigated. Sucks to be me if someone decides to steal my toner, or swap out their used home cartridge with my new one after-hours.
I tried pointing out that the tracking was more expensive than the occasional lost cartridge... for my troubles I got to compare the cost savings on toner post-tracking system.
Turns out, a company of 90 full-time employees was losing over $3000 per year on 'missing' toner. Who knew?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai