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Cryptography To Frustrate Printer-Ink Piracy
Zack Melich writes with news of a new front about to open in the war printer manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and hardware hackers. A San Francisco company, Cryptography Research Inc., is designing a crypto chip to marry cartridges to printers. There's no word so far that any printer manufacturer has committed to using it. Quoting: "The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it harder for printers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges. CRI plans to create a secure chip that will allow only certain ink cartridges to communicate with certain printers. CRI also said that the chip will be designed that so large portions of it will have no decipherable structure, a feature that would thwart someone attempting to reverse-engineer the chip by examining it under a microscope to determine how it works. 'You can see 95 percent of the [chip's] grid and you still don't know how it works,' said Kit Rodgers, CRI's vice president of business development. Its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."
Is this even legal?
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I hope any printer manufacturer engaging in this sort of anti-competitive skullduggery is punished HARD in the marketplace. I do not want the manufacturer of anything I buy encrypting it so that I cannot use MY possession as I wish. With all due respect to the special problem of digitized Intellectual Property and other reproducibles, I do not want my car-maker to lock me into only using their strangely constructed non-interchangeable tires and wheels UNLESS as in the case of say, a Corvette or other exotic, there is a compelling QUALITY interest.
I bought an EPSON CX 5200 and it turned out to be a lemon. There was no fix, no refund, it just sucked after about a year. It was a hundred-dollar Jackson Pollock(sp?) machine, and the reason was that the experimental ink cartridge design was crap. My printer would work just fine if the business model were not to use cheap printers to lock you into expensive ink cartridges. My printer would print, if that were the goal of the printer-makers.
I will never buy another EPSON, and I'm glad to say so to so many people. Unless, of course, they were to come out against this encryption nonsense.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Since dreaming costs no money... what about having HP, Epson, Canon and name-another join together to deliver an open standard on Ink cartdriges?
Or have the prices sunken so badly that there is no point of return anymore to selling hardware at its price?
-- Der Tunfisch.
From the customer point of view, it is not silly, can be called wasteful, but it is economic sound
This is what I did when the four cartridges for my laserjet 2600n did cost more than a new printer
Really, I did buy a second printer since overall I was saving 50Euros over buying the for cartridges...
When they run out I will buy something else (more linux compatible)
What makes me sad is that it is quite difficult for manufactures to actually "convince" a customer that a more expensive printer with a cheaper "refill" is worthwhile.
Maybe they should have a simple page that says "total costo over a year", where you input how many pages you plan to print and it will compare a printer against the others. This would be good for the environment, and the customers, less for sneaky companies that tends to mess up with advertising
I really don't understand the economics and consumer dynamics around the printer market these days. Surely printer technology has reached a plateau for most normal people? Is that why some corporate madman decided to adopt a blades and razors approach to the consumer printing market? I know it's been a fixture of the corporate colour copier / printer market for a long while now ... but ... why not just charge the correct price for the printer and the consumables?
A what the hell are people printing so damn much of that the consumables business is sooooo lucrative?
I've never been all that into generating large reams of paper at home. For my day job, I print documentation, reports, manuscripts, etc at the office and lug it home when I want a hard copy of something I'm editing online.
For my photography, I send files to a lab and have my images printed. I've considered printing at home - but I would expect archival inks and decent papers to be pricey. I really don't know why I'd want to keep a printer in a corner of my room waiting for those three or four colour 4x5's that I just HAVE to print then and there - and which can't wait for Apple / Kodak / Peak Imaging to deliver to my door in a couple of days. Surely iPhoto or Picasa is a hell of a lot simpler than fiddling with inkjet printers?
When I was writing more long-form pieces, I had a Brother laser printer. Cost me $100 at the time and I could print books without running out of toner. The cartridges weren't that cheap, but it took a nice long while before I had to change them out.
Surely it makes sense for most people just to send their photos off to be printed and to keep a cheap laser printer around for text?
I think this secure chip news is "Cryptography Research Inc" way of drumming up business. They want to sell/licence the chip to printer manufacturers.
u st_law/
But I think the wider issue is, the continuing attempts to prevent 3rd party printer cartridges, shows blatant violation of antitrust laws.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitr
Its about time legal action was taken against these companies.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
He hit the damned nail on the head, you idiot anonymous mod. How is this NOT "digital rights management"?
This firm has designed hardware/firmware that would let printer manufacturers digitally restrict your use of their product, i.e. the printer, by preventing OEMs from making alternative cartridges and you from having choices. Isn't that rights management? If a competitor actually succeeded in creating a knockoff, you'd see a repeat of the stunt Lexmark pulled with toner cartridges: they'd sue in court under the provisions of the DMCA. In this case, this sleazebag Cryptography Research would no doubt jump in with a patent infringement suit, as well.
It's bad enough that average people are such a complete disappointment; when I see people here mod like that, even Slashdot disappoints me.
Most of the time, the calculation usually goes more along the lines of: "I'll buy this printer on sale for $40 and instead of buying the $50 replacement refills (because usually the black and colour cartridges cost about $25 each), I'll just toss it and buy this month's $40 printer."
And actually, I can usually pack the thing back in the box and take it down to the pawn shop and get $15-20 for it thus further offsetting the cost of replacing the printer every month.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
I am a graphic designer that uses a high end inkjet printer to produce prints for sale. Not all of us want laser printers. Lasers are cheap office tools, not designed for print quality. My printer uses eight cartridges, original Epson price: $25, Epson Compatible price $5. You do the math. The inkjet cartridge market always was a scam, and like any other market, the supply will fit the demand, so refills and compatibles move in. Apart from people fraudulently pirating lookalike OEM cartridges, I see no reason why quality inks cannot be sold by other companies. It ensures that the likes of HP and Epson keep their prices down.
"I like to skate on the other side of the ice"
Hewlett Packard "chips a number of their cartridges. I know one major ink-refill franchise that has a device to override the electronics. Basically, it just fries the chip, and the printer doesn't recognise it has been refilled.
"I like to skate on the other side of the ice"
Not to be completely off topic, but I think the print cartridge companies would have better luck if they incorporated a "lab on chip" style spectrometer in the print head of every cartridge. That way, only the "patented ink formula" could be used in the cartridge, any other kind would signal the print head to stop. In this effect, they'd lock out all re-fillers until they could recreate the ink formula exactly which would be no small task (or cheap - their only selling point)
Kodak has priced their new printers a bit higher than the competition, but include the print head in the printer so cartridge costs are much lower ($10 black cartridge, $15 5-color cartridge). Yes the ink prices are still higher than they should be but they are much closer in line with reality.
Printronix line printers will not let you reuse a ribbon if it has been used once. There are tricks you can do to bypass this limit, as a ribbon can last for three or four pases with no quality problems.
:-)
Ink is not the only consumable you need to buy in professional printers, there are a lot of flimsy plastic components that tend to break more often than others. When you take a look at them, you'll see it makes perfect sense to have them made of metal, but that will last longer
($60 USD for a little 2" by 4" plastic L-shaped ribbon holder ??)
"You admit that there is a problem. And it's rather obvious that the market isn't fixing it, because this shit's been going on for years. So why do you still push the "let the market decide" line?"
Because while I may agree that the pricing is obscene, I'm honest enough to admit that it doesn't rise to a level that I really give a crap about. Have a problem with inkject cartridges being so expensive? Do what I do - use a laser printer, and forego all the pretty colors that cost so much.
Voila, problem solved.
The "OMFG print cartridges can't be refilled" community is like any other tightly knit, very tightly WOUND group of nerds....pretty much nobody outside the group really cares.
-Styopa
For my usage pattern, inkjet printers are one-time-use devices: since it may be weeks between print jobs, the printheads are often hopelessly clogged by the time I try to use the printer again. With disposable inkjets being a $50-a-pop proposition, my last replacement was one of those $200 (after $350 instant rebate) color laser printers I saw on liquidation last year. By now, it has certainly paid for itself a few times over and I am only about half-way through the OEM toners.
Right now, I am wondering if I should buy a set of replacement cartridges before they go out of production or just replace the printer when its toner runs out... at the current pace, it is going to be over a year past its warranty by the time its OEM cartridges are spent anyhow.
I hate throwing stuff out but we're really living in throw-away consumerism, this is quite a contrast to all the pro-environment face so many try to put on.