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Regionally Encoded Toner Cartridges 'to Serve Customers Better'
sandbagger writes: The latest attempt to create artificial scarcity comes from Xerox, according to the editors at TechDirt, who cite German sources: "Xerox uses region coding on their toner cartridges AND locks the printer to the first type used. So if you use a North America cartridge you can't use the cheaper Eastern Europe cartridges. The printer's display doesn't show this, nor does the hotline know about it. When c't reached out to Xerox, the marketing drone claimed, this was done to serve the customer better..."
Fixed that for you, Xerox.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Spoilers: it's a cookbook.
Otherwise you would end up printing in PAL instead of NTSC.
After all this time, and something so blatant - does Xerox really think this isn't obvious to everyone what they are doing? They have to lie to us to justify it?
They do not have a monopoly, we can just go to a different brand that has some respect for their customers.
Why do we get through so much paper? Everything is electronic now, but much of it seems to need a printed copy too.
They mean it in the "bend over and get 'served'" sense of the word?
God but Xerox and the other printer companies are ran by assholes.
And, of course, they can now use the DMCA to prevent someone making cartridges.
This is why we can't have nice things. Because idiot politicians have given all the power to corporations, and consumers no longer have any choice in the matter but to get fucked^Wserverd however is dictated to them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I guess this is the next logical step from HP chipping ink cartridges to enforce an expiration date.
This must have looked like an amazing idea on some MBA's PowerPoint presentation -- manufacture the exact same thing, sell it for more in the developed world, -and- increase market share in the developing world. Just have to hope the customers don't find out about it....oops.
Airlines do this all the time. They charge more for last minute purchases or travel over holidays even though the customer is getting the same service -- moving them from point to point. Why? Because they can!! The difference in this case is that Xerox can now force customers to keep paying the higher fare.
When you buy a new printer, ask your local refill shop which is the most hassle free. Then get that one.
"To Server Customers Better"
Its a cook book!
.
When companies are so blatant about wanting to overcharge their customers, it makes it real easy to identify them and remove the bad companies from our approved vendor list.
Certainly Xerox can manufacture whatever products they like. We have the right not to buy them (and, say, buy from the competition). Two remarks anyway:
1. Doing this in secret is underhanded, and they should be upfront, Despite the negative reaction by some members of the public ("it's unfair that I'm paying more than X"), there is nothing wrong with a company trying for market segmentation. They should tell the complainers to grow up
2. Everyone should own whatever they own. So, if I own a printer or a toner cartridge, I should have the right to modify and reprogram them however I like (say, to report a different zone or to ignore zonal coding). Courts have rebuffed Xerox and Lexmark as they attempted to use the DMCA to protect their business strategies, but the DMCA (US), Bill C-11 (Canada) and their worldwide clones still apply to DVD-players, for example. That should stop.
Lexmark bakes TPM and DRM into their media to prevent refilling and third party toner companies from encroaching on their razor blade model. arguably it does benefit the customer, as no toner barrel will permit more than a set number of copies from ever being exceeded which would result in poor print quality due to lack of toner. aftermarket toner is argued to be inferior to Lexmarks proprietary toner and in many cases, especially with Lexmarks shaped particulate technology, it is. region coding allows marketing to lock-in anticompetitive pricing for a product, but does little else.
that having been said, printing is an industry dying a slow death. consumers have been soured to printing ever since the media for inkjet began to cost more than human blood. The internet in turn has rendered most printing in the office environment nearly taboo. thermal printing survives based on outright artificially high prices for the printers themselves, as the paper is ubiquitous. Xerox wont face much backlash over this as their customers are almost exclusively businesses, and theyre one of a handful of vendors that support exotic markets like classified document printing.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I've been in the copier/printer/fax/computer business for over 30 years. Region locking things has been going on for about that long. It first started with designing a tab, prong or other plastic part, to prevent a cartridge from working. Savin, some Lanier, Ricoh boxes are the same, but their cartridges won't fit. Toshiba, some lanier, Kyocera boxes are the same, but their toner won't fit. They use to do it with the above mentioned "break away" tabs (if you knew what to change), but that wasn't good enough, so they put a different drive gear coupling on the rear. But that wasn't good enough. Now a lot of them have either a CRM chip, or an RFID chip on the back of the cartridge that gets close enough to the one in the machine to read it. If they don't match, it won't work. In the "olden" days of dry toner copier, they did this to prevent a person from refilling the toner cartridges. With the color copiers/printers, the particle sizes have reached such a small size, and, the temperature melting points are becoming so small, that if you vary the toner or carrier just a very small amount, it makes a mess and can destroy some components. The DRM on cartridges is a PITA because if you slap a genuine new one in, and it doesn't read, it creates a service call. Sometimes, you can go in and tell it to look for the cartridge again, but if that doesn't work, you have to reject the cartridge and RMA it back to the company.
Why don't they just put a gun to our heads and take our money? Fuck Xerox!
I remember seeing a (print) advertisement 20+ years ago; it may have even been a full-pager in a big paper. Xerox was extolling the benefits of the paperless office. Fast forward to today and they are selling more printers. What's old is new again.
Is it dots per millimeter or dots per centimeter?
This is done all the time with disposables in medical devices.
yes indeed, the risk of death is the same for toner cartridges and medical devices
So if they region lock it so we can't use the (same, but) cheaper cartridges from Eastern Europe and Asia, can we region lock it so they can't use the cheaper workers from Easter Europe and Asia?
I'm wondering about how the printer driver is capable of figuring out the installation location and select it at the time of first use. At least with the CD units of old, a pop-up window asking you to confirm the region was issued. Here, though, they claim that the selection is silent, without notifying the customer.
"Yeah, we did that to ensure that we can gouge as much as possible. You see, international trade and benefiting from cheap labor abroad is only good if we can profit from it, not when it cuts into our profits."
Seriously? Did you expect him to tell you the truth? C'mon, be reasonable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Like "Value Edition"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If any of these countries are part of the Eurozone and this is preventing someone from one part of the EU using something from another part of the EU, then Xerox will have some answering to do. EU laws, from my understanding, make this sort of thing illegal within its territory.
If you are region locked to the whole Eurozone, then that is okay. Of course it doesn't change that this is a dick move, on the part of Xerox, IMO.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Perhaps, but it's a choice by printer companies to save money and simplify maintenance. It'd be a bit like if lawnmowers had a combined sump/oil filter that came pre-filled with oil. Nice, simple, and quick to replace. But perhaps the filter lasts longer than the oil, or vice versa.
In a big printer, like a car or riding lawnmower, having them be separate makes sense. Diesel Trucks(and I'm not talking pickups here), often have different maintenance intervals for their filters and oil. For that matter, they'll often TEST their oil to make sure it's still good, because testing makes financial sense when you're looking at a 40 quart oil change vs a 5 quart one. In many cases they'll replace the oil filter only, pour in a new quart of oil to replace the oil lost in the filter, and keep on going.
When it comes to cartridges, there's 'usually' 1-3 components. Toner, drum, and waste toner storage. The problem you can get with remanufactured ones is if the toner (2k pages) is put into a heavily recycled cartridge without also replacing the drum (~40k pages) and emptying the waste toner.
I don't read AC A human right
By taking more money from our customers, it ensures that they have less money to waste of fatty foods and sugary sodas, ensuring better health for them.
YOU'RE WELCOME!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
In Germany, there's no metric equivalent in use. You also use dpi, mostly because you read it everywhere.
The release was written in Neuspeak, invented first for banks and hotels in the mid-twentieth century.
In neuspeak, "for your convenience" really means "for our profit."
"For your safety" means "For our convenience."
Neuspeak is spreading slowly to other industries, as well, but its form and syntax were perfected when used on a sign on a shuttered bank office in Sycamore, Ohio, which read: "For your convenience, this branch is closed."
Please understand that *everything* the company does is "to serve the customer better". Just look it up in our mission statement. See ... that's why we have a mission statement in the first place!
I was wondering how many dots there were per meter.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
>better serve customers
>cause printer incapable of serving
PRspeak or not it's wrong, because they literally block the device from the "serve" verb.
If I may speak as a layman, they're twits who should fuck themselves with rusty garden tools, while Robin Hood hands out the scumprofits to their customers/employees.
the deepest darkest secret of the medical industry is that people are generally pretty healthy and bounce back from most illnesses with no intervention needed... if this idea gets out into the wild it will "infect" the populace with the realization that drs are people in fancy coats and hospitals are expensive buildings that should be used for offices. don't even get me started on "x-rays" or "mri rays", things that are invisible are suppost to show if we're sick or not? also, they hold back on vaccines to heart disease insulin etc, it's more lucrative to treat the symptoms then solve the problem...
I find it convenient you didn't mention the razor blade portion of his comment. Like wire coat hangers, there is a decidedly non-zero mortality rate associated with every unit sold. (/ducks)
They meant to say it's 'to Service, Customers Better'
Service, as in: 'what the bull does to the cow to make calves'.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
6-10 sheets of paper on my desk and compare and contrast all of them at once
How many eyeballs do you have?
Two, with both foveas pointed the same way, but with other documents in peripheral vision to preserve the visuospatial sense of context that a one-thing-at-a-time display lacks.
Brought to you by the DNC troll committee. Slashdot has no credibility when idiots like this post.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Some 5 years ago at a Christmas sale I picked up a basic Epson printer / scanner / fax for this silly amount of money. I don't use it much, but it has successfully printed my academic essays over the years. It accepts non-Epson cartridges bought off the internet for less than $7. What's not to like?
Epson seems to be inching into the right direction: http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
I bought an Epson printer once maybe 5-6 years ago. It refused to recognize the ink cartridges that came with the printer from the factory. There were official Epson ink cartridges. Know what the fix for this is? Get another printer. No joke. There is no fix. You have to replace the printer. So I returned it for a refund and went with Canon. The Canon has its own issues, mostly being vvvvvveeerrrrryyyy ssssssllllloooooowwwww to warm up, but I've never had it refuse to recognize an official Canon ink cartridge.
Whenever a company says that some ridiculous policy is to "serve you better", I have a flashback to the Dinosaurs episode where Fran introduces a store to the concept of accepting returns. The store manager exclaims: "This might be just what we need to crush our competition, become a monopoly, and serve you better!"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Really? If I buy a Turbo Supra Mach 6 Extreme cartridge pack from Europe, and try to place a razor on a handle I bought in North America, then not only does it not fit (for the intended, actual model), but it bricks/disables the handle until I hire a certified technician to fix my handle for $600 / hr?
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
And the word IS being used as a verb.
Toner?
Paper?
Scissors?
Rock?
What's that???
Why you printing?
Rarely is needed.
Xerox doomed.
With advancement in hardware. Most encryption schemes are cracked because they're implemented on underpowered hardware. This is changing rapidly. More's law might be at a dead end but we've only just started making processors cheaper and more power efficient. Give Xerox ten years and their carts will be uncrackable. I know it's fashionable to day the hackers always win, but in the real world they don't..
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Dots per metre, obviously.
The SI has only one unit of length, the meter. All other 'units' are divisions or multiples thereof.
This screws any selling of copiers between regions too....
Most inkjet manufacturers have been doing this for years!
11,811.03 for 300 dpi. I had to do the math for the hell of it just to see how absurd it would look to talk about 11,811 dpm as a display/print resolution.
Then I started thinking maybe it would be a semi-practical metric for comparing larger monitors. Right now you have the physical display size, the physical device's display panel and then the video encoding resolution all being talked about as being, say, "4K".
It's not a measure of physical size (although I have had people tell me that got a new TV and when I asked how big they said 4K). Video can be encoded for 4K but doesn't mean the source was. A display could theoretically even have a sub-4k panel but automagically downsample 4K content for it's screen so it's "4k compatible".
DPM isn't much better but at least it would use a ratio of the device's physical size to the actual number of pixels in its panel.
Yeah, well... I'm gonna go build my own toner cartridges, with blackjack and hookers.
Printers, otherwise known in the industry as Toner Dispensers.
Manufacturers, especially Xerox, internally (and only half-jokingly) refer to printers as Toner Dispensers. It's where they make a massive amount of their revenue from.
Sure, when they're selling a printer for a price in the 10's of $k, they're not exactly making a loss, or only just breaking even on the hardware, there's still a decent amount of margin on this - but the ongoing revenue stream (and the reason they try to get everyone onto managed print services) is in selling toner, and lots of it.
Over the life of a printer (or copier, which is just a big printer with a scanner built into it) the cost of consumables will be far greater than the initial purchase price of the machine. Generally, toner is cheaper on bigger and more expensive printers (which in itself is strange as it's the same toner) - this is why if you're printing a large volume, you're better off getting a more expensive printer with cheaper toner.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
There is no need for government regulation here. The market will fix this.
The market isn't going to fix a practice that will be adopted by the other identical companies. If anything, it will increase in adoption despite consumer action.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If the businesses stopped with such practices, government wouldn't have its constituents calling them to action.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
See, most of their customers, including their largest customers, are very likely to be unaffected by the change as they're not buying off-brand or foreign toner cartridges.
This is not about off-brand or foreign cartridges.
Those things are bulky. Any profit made on the favorable exchange rate gets eaten in transport.
This is about "developing markets" in "emerging economies" being forced to buy local models of Xerox machines - instead of far cheaper refurbished ones which got replaced by new models in the "first world".
At the same time, this would force local cottage industries that provide refills in those countries to start importing "first world" used Xerox cartridges.
And since those things are bulky, it would eat at their profits and many if not all would have to shutter their stores.
It's a win-win-win.
It forces sales of "third world" models in the "third world", it forces sales of original cartridges AND it takes a swing at the refill cottage industries all over the world, at least for some time.
In theory.
Only issue is that the entire idea revolves around the notion of people respecting their rules of regional encoding.
Instead of finding a way to get around them.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It's a cookbook!
Nowadays for some reason, the popular search engines don't know about semantic URLs. I keep having to delete the cruft of the URLs before posting them.
s,e,r,v,e is not enough letters to spell "buttfuck"
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I'm not even talking about POST parameters. Domain name: http://www.epson.com/
Why is that even part of the URL? Useless: cgi-bin/
That doesn't look like an online store page to me: Store/
Who cares what language you're using on the server? Another useless part: jsp/
Landing? What the hell is that supposed to tell me? Useless again!: Landing/
The page name is descriptive enough, but there's a useless file extension?: ecotank-super-tank-printers.do
The proper URL should be:
http://www.epson.com/printers/...
The URL says "super-tank" but the text on the page says "supertank". They didn't even get that part right, let alone the rest of the messed up URL.
How would regioncoding benefit the user, it's not like the toner defines what language can be printed...
IMHO regionalcoding should be banned and should be forbidden..
I think you got this one wrong, as your thinking is probably 20 years obsolete.
Cartridges are more expense in Eastern Europe. Many from E.Europe buy cartridges from US websites.
Cheaper workers..... Yahwn.... Eastern Europeans do not come to work to USA more frequently than Australians or Japanese. First of all, because they are part of 500M+ European Union now, where people can move freely. Europeans can travel to work to other country, such as UK or Germany, without visas, green cards, fingerprinting and the wait. It is cheaper to fly form Warsaw or Bucharest to Berlin or London, than to San Francisco.
To put it briefly: Eastern Europeans are not flocking to USA anymore.....