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Printer Makers Are Crippling Cheap Ink Cartridges Via Bogus 'Security Updates' (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Printer maker Epson is under fire this month from activist groups after a software update prevented customers from using cheaper, third party ink cartridges. It's just the latest salvo in a decades-long effort by printer manufacturers to block consumer choice, often by disguising printer downgrades as essential product improvements. For several decades now printer manufacturers have lured consumers into an arguably-terrible deal: shell out a modest sum for a mediocre printer, then pay an arm and a leg for replacement printer cartridges that cost relatively-little to actually produce.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation now says that Epson has been engaged in the same behavior. The group says it recently learned that in late 2016 or early 2017, Epson issued a "poison pill" software update that effectively downgraded user printers to block third party cartridges, but disguised the software update as a meaningful improvement. The EFF has subsequently sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, arguing that Epson's lack of transparency can easily be seen as "misleading and deceptive" under Texas consumer protection laws. "When restricted to Epson's own cartridges, customers must pay Epson's higher prices, while losing the added convenience of third party alternatives, such as refillable cartridges and continuous ink supply systems," the complaint notes. "This artificial restriction of third party ink options also suppresses a competitive ink market and has reportedly caused some manufacturers of refillable cartridges and continuous ink supply systems to exit the market."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation now says that Epson has been engaged in the same behavior. The group says it recently learned that in late 2016 or early 2017, Epson issued a "poison pill" software update that effectively downgraded user printers to block third party cartridges, but disguised the software update as a meaningful improvement. The EFF has subsequently sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, arguing that Epson's lack of transparency can easily be seen as "misleading and deceptive" under Texas consumer protection laws. "When restricted to Epson's own cartridges, customers must pay Epson's higher prices, while losing the added convenience of third party alternatives, such as refillable cartridges and continuous ink supply systems," the complaint notes. "This artificial restriction of third party ink options also suppresses a competitive ink market and has reportedly caused some manufacturers of refillable cartridges and continuous ink supply systems to exit the market."
Every once in a while we have an electronics recycling in our area, and they took a count of how many printers they got that were still functional, and it turned out to be about 65%; about 85% of those they could “resale” (meaning they had power cord, etc enough to make them usable, sans new ink). They tried to give them to the local thrift shops, but they usually refuse them because they already have too many of them to try to sell. So they end up in landfills.
So now the local towns are thinking of putting restrictions on the sale of those types of printers.
AC comments get piped to
Charging massively over inflated prices for new ink cartridges is just part of their environment friendly campaign. People will get so feed up with paying ridiculous amounts of money for the 'official' replacements compared to the cheap versions that they can no longer use that they will just stop using printers all together. It's a win-win for the environment!
You don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
It is obvious you've never printed *any* HDR photography -- let alone portraits -- on both inkjets and color laser printers. The difference is substantial up close. Professional, and consumers, use ink jets to get the best quality for photos on premium photo paper such as 8, 10, and 12 ink systems.
i.e.
* Laser printers are awesome for text but OK for photographs such as their inability to produce artifact free gradients due to the toner when placed being basically fine dots on paper,
* Inkjet printers are OK for text (slightly blurry) but phenomenal for photographs due to their higher gamut coverage and "area bleeding" producing smooth gradients.
Myself and others have both because you want to use the right tool for the job that gives the best quality.
It's no surprise at all. Printers are sold on thin, or negative margins. Consumers will pay $50 for the unit which needs overpriced service and ink, and shun the more expensive models which would be cheaper in the long run.
You simply can't break into the market with a more expensive upfront cost, and you can't make a better unit cheaper. I'd love to have someone prove me wrong.
And I mean real capitalism, not the fake stuff the nationalists talk about.
If you buy something, you have the right to modify it, repair it, and use it with other people's products. That is what OWNING it means. If you want to rent stuff instead of sell, that's fine, but you don't have the right to rent it while pretending you are selling it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I remember when my Mom found out I didn't have a printer a decade or so ago and she treated it like I was going through some sort of financial hardship like when my parents found out around the same period that I didnt have cable TV anymore. Sure enough I got a printer for that years Christmas that still sits in a closet in its original packaging.
Fortunatly people are coming around on how worthless printers are now and what a price gouge they have always been. These companies are just hastening their own demise with this crooked shit
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
What's especially annoying with liquid dye printers is that you KNOW that the great majority of users don't use them regularly, so the ink dries out or the inevitable head cleaning uses up a significant portion of the ink, and the price per page becomes ridiculous. Printer companies *know* this -- it's part of their business plan.
For mothers and mothers-in-law, I recommend mid-level color laser printers. The quality is Good Enough for printing facebook photos to tack on the wall, the toner cartridges last a long time, and they never dry out. It's fairly easy to make this case financially, especially to someone frustrated with how much it's costing, and how much they have to dink with the hardware, just to print pictures of their grandkids.
I do photography, but I outsource all my printing. When customers order prints from my website, an outside service does the actual printing and delivery. For ad-hoc printing, I sneaker-net a thumb drive over to some place that can print it for me. And recently, with grocery store chains and drug store chains buying the same Epson roll printers that used to be found only in professional print services, it doesn't really matter who does your printing, if you do your own color correction and don't need special paper.
In the rare instance I need art gallery level printing, I'm not going to do that at home anyway. I'm going to upload my image to a professional print service and either will-call it or have it shipped to me.
The POINT being, there's NO REASON TO OWN A DAMNED DYE-BASED PRINTER and a whole lot of reasons NOT to own one.
Or if you're going to buy one of the stupid things, buy the printer on sale, and when the demo cartridges run out, THROW THE WHOLE PRINTER AWAY and buy another printer on sale. E-waste be damned. Tell the manufacturers to adopt a less wasteful business model.
Let's all as consumers stop acting like battered wives, shall we? Stop playing the game, and the game will change.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There is nobody on the right side of this.
You have manufacturers that are willing to take advantage of consumer's greedy nature. Then you have consumers that think they can get something for nothing.
The only solution is if you don't like it don't buy crappy printers. I know I got good value out of my LaserJet II that finally died last year. It was so nice I was more than willing to do my own repair work on it.
Inkjet printers use liquid that spreads out just a bit after it's placed. Laser printers use a solid pigment that stays exactly where it is placed, giving a sharper image.
Text is good sharp. Portraits and most other photography isn't supposed to have sharp, crisp lines between different colors. Photos are best with a softer transition between colors.
> I have been told laser printers make inferior picture prints.
As someone who has BOTH a color laser printer and inkjet that is indeed TRUE.
* Laser printers are awesome for text but OK for photographs,
* Inkjet printers are OK for text (slightly blurry) but phenomenal for portraits, and HDR photographs.
One of the many standard "litmus test images" are the ones listed on the defunct Outback Print
From 3+ feet away you can't tell the difference between an inkjet and color laser on "natural" images. (i.e. non test patterns.) But closer then 3 feet and you start to notice the flaws of color laser printers -- especially gradients that have artifacts. Not Mach Banding but error dot diffusion patterns due to the small size of toner color laser printers basically "print" in a halftone pattern.
> I doubt professional industry-grade printing firms print their photos on inkjet printers.
That's because they care more about cost then quality.
> see no reason why laser printer pigments would have to be inferior.
I take it you don't do much (any?) printing of HDR photos. Here is a primer (pardon the pun.)
First, color laser printers only have the standard 4 color CYMK toners. This means the gamut is not quite as large as inkjets's dyes and pigments.
Second, in Canon printers the large black "PGI" cartridge are pigments which is used when printing text. The remaining color tanks may be dye based inks which tend to have smaller particles than the pigment based inks. See Canon PGI vs CLI for more details.
Third, inkjets tend to have more dyes then just the standard 4 color CYMK inks. For example, the Canon Pixma PRO-1 is a 12 pigment system. Why 12?
5 are dedicated for black and white printing:
* LGY (Light Gray)
* GY (Grey)
* DGY (Dark Grey)
* MBK (Matte Black)
* PBK (Photo Black)
Remaining 7 are for colors:
* C (Cyan)
* Y (Yellow)
* M (Magenta)
* R (Red)
* PC (Photo Cyan)
* PM (Phtoto Magenta)
* CO (Chroma Optimizer)
If you want the best quality the type of printer inkjet vs color laser matters due to printing technology. i.e. For every day use a color laser printer is more then good enough but if you want quality portraits nothing beats an inkjet.
Which have the exact same issues.
Mod parent up insightful please. I have a graphic design degree and couldn't sum it up better myself.
I've tried aftermarket cartridges a few times. They seem to be o.k. for a while but inevitably they clog the print head.
Cleaning the head is usually an endless cycle of "clean print head/check print head" attempts that just consume ink like crazy. I have tried removing the head and cleaning it with no success. Once clogged the printer is history.
Is it still true that Canon inkjet printers don't have DRM-style ink cartridges like Epson?
Because the last time I read about it, Canon was the last refill-friendly printer company out there.
#DeleteFacebook
Perhaps you should read about how a laser printer works. The laser never hits the toner.
It's used to dissipate the static charge on the drum so it only picks up toner in the correct place to print the image.
The only heating that occurs is the drum that fuses the toner to the paper. That only melts the toner, it doesn't vaporise it.
Ink jet printers on the other do vaporise ink in some types.
HP used to brag that the instantaneous temperature inside the print head heats up hotter than the surface of the Sun. It's called "thermal drop-on-demand" . Canon, HP and Lexmark use it.
At a big commercial printer you might find either toner-based or inkjet digital printers. Each does something better than the other (but neither is as good as offset).
Guess what printer I will not be buying in the future...
You would do well to avoid an Epson ink printer anyway. While they may make some high-quality professional printers with 8, 10, or 12 colors, their consumer models have permanent print-heads that are supplied with ink from replaceable cartridges. That means you print-head can clog and need cleaning if you use it infrequently.
Contrast this with other manufacturers who, while they may play some of the same tricks as Epson, at least sell you a new print-head with each cartridge. And remanufacturers can (and hopefully do) clean the print-head before they resell the cartridge.
I'll grant that my experience with Epson is a little dated. They may have switched to replaceable print-heads.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
" If it ain't broke, don't fix it " still applies . . . .
. . . though in the electronics ( especially the computer ) world it should probably read " If it's working fine, don't upgrade it lest you break it "
I love my Kyocera office-grade (not home user) laser printer, bought for $50 at a surplus auction: Stick any old third-party cartridge in it and it reports "Genuine cartridge installed" and runs with it. None of this cartridge DRM crap.
I bought an Epson XP-830 after reading it was a "best buy" in Consumer Reports.
Maybe they should include this ink refill topic in their ratings?
That said, I have no complaints and the operating costs seem reasonable.
I have always wondered about this and I'm sure one can make new technology to make a different kind of printing.
But then I realized that most likely they have Patents up the Gazoo and anything you come up with you will be sued by these guys.
I hate printers and printer companies for this reason, and don't print unless I absolutely have to.
I used mid-level colour laser printers it's really good, I m not facing any printer problem. If I face a problem I solved my issue with this site https://www.brotherprintersupp...
Who paid you to write this ?
> and shun the more expensive models which would be cheaper in the long run.
Yes, because there is no guarantee that they will actually be cheaper to run. This promise has been made a few times, and been broken every time.
The only potential difference in the market is the subscription model, where ink is included, and you pay for a certain number of prints per month. That offers an opportunity to be truly competitive.
I don't think you can fight this sort of human nature though. I have a cheap espresso machine at home. To make a coffee, I put two scoops into the portafilter, press it down, stick it into the machine and turn the knob to push the water through. 30s later I have espresso. To clean, I take the portafilter off and smack it on the top of the rubbish bin.
How on earth it is considered better or easier to use a capsule machine is beyond me, yet millions of consumers choose to become enslaved to those expensive little non-biodegradable pods every year. It is just the way humans work. If anything it is the scourge of middle class apathy - the same thing that is causing many of the problems with our politics right now.
is needed which mandates display of: (a) ability to use third party parts; (b) ability to use third party repair shops. This should apply to any product that has an expected life of more than one month. The minimum prominence of the display (size, positioning, etc) should be specified. This should also apply to marketing, including web sites.
Once consumers start to notice this they will start to make buying decisions on this information. This will make manufacturers change. It might mean that it costs more to buy a printer, but cost over a few years should go down.
IT product review/comparison web sites could help with the problem today: Include these 2 data points in every review/comparison.
What the printer manufacturers are doing is just the same as John Deere does with tractors.
and yet here we are every year the printer companies come out with new models with form factors especially for the ink and toner supply, and none of these printers are readily end user serviceable with available replacement parts.
I have a 7 year old Brother printer that I bought for $35. Just recently I replaced the toner and the drum, with whatever I found on Amazon. It doesn't have the brother badge on it so it's after market, but Brother still sells the parts as well. A few years ago I replaced the feed roller, that was also a $5 part from ebay.
I really don't know what your complaint is about, but it sure isn't universal.
But since I doubt professional industry-grade printing firms prit their photos on inkjet printers.
Define professional industry grade. You'll find there's a wide variety of printers out there for a wide variety of purposes including laser, inkjet, and lithography.
In the professional / industrial arena you'll happily find inkjets costing upwards of several thousands of dollars. They are used for professional photos, but you also find them for very large format printers since it is still one of the best ways to make a quality print in a compact form factor while printing on huge rolls of paper.
And I also see no reason why laser printer pigments would have to be inferior.
Inferior to what. Each medium has it's benefits and drawbacks.
After that experience I always use chipless cartridges and I will never buy Epson under any circumstances. The reality is that printers do not need to put microchips on a cart for any technical reason - an optical sensor is far more reliable. It's simply an anti-consumer, anti-competitive move. I'm kind of surprised the EU doesn't force this issue, possibly even forcing printers to adopt some standard cartridge sizes while they're at it to stop this BS.
Because the current economic system punishes any system designed to operate for decades unless it requires an ongoing maintenance contract.
The companies producing these devices need to show growth in their business and increased sales, but that's hard to do when your customers will buy one product that lasts 20 years.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I did the same with an old hp laserjet, has network connectivity, supports postscript and pcl so it works with everything, has duplexer etc... Came with a toner that's supposed to be good for 20k pages and its still around 98% full.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Lol. There he is again, the guy I was talking about last week. Apparently he thinks I'm white, based on the fact that I'm honest enough to link to the government's own official statements about their policies.
Iâ(TM)ve hacked a few Epsons with Rihac inklink inkwells.
Some people do a fairly heavy amount of printing and generally speaking these units hack the printer into thinking that the inkwell system is a legitimate set of ink cartridges.
Refill the inkwells when needed and keep printing.
We know all the brands try to prevent third party cartridges. HP being the worst.
Never update the firmware on your printer!
So called security updates just try to block the hacks.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
You're talking about way different classes of printers. The cheapest "ecoTank" I saw is around $200, and go WAY up from there. I bought an Epson last year from WalMart because I needed to print a couple of photos in a hurry, it cost me $35. (I was able to print about a dozen letter sized pages of pictures before the ink was cashed. $50 for a replacement set)
As an aside, it's interesting to see the relatively large number of comments this thread has attracted already. That strongly suggests that this is a widespread concern or issue.
In the summer of 2016 I purchased an HP OfficeJet 8100 printer. Relatively fast print speed, duplex printing, offered as an "office printer", able to handle reasonable workloads, but with longevity and long term reliability in mind. Worked perfectly up until earlier this year. Only ever used 100% original HP inks.
Earlier this year (March?) Microsoft shipped a major update to Windows 10 that nuked my Windows build and forced a clean OS re-installation. By the time I got to installing the printer driver, I was so tired that I mistakenly agreed to activating the "phone home" feature of the software part of the driver. Within a day the printer died, with the diagnostics complaining of a print head failure.
I've done a lot of hardware maintenance in my time, on equipment far more delicate than a print head. I stripped the head from the printer, cleaned it, put it all back together but this made no difference. The printer had been bricked, remotely. The bricking happened the moment I connected my printer software to the internet. Coincidence? I think not. There was *nothing* wrong with the print head.
This is a long-standing tactic of these companies. It's about time a consumer watchdog took them to task. Better, it's about time a government prosecuted them for it. It's about time a few company directors did some serious jail time for fraud.
Yes, because there is no guarantee that they will actually be cheaper to run.
Well, yeah, there is; what do you think the total-price-per-print is for a shitty consumer-grade printer (that requires proprietary ink cartridges) vs a workgroup laser printer??
Or set a static address on the printer but don't set a gateway, it won't be able to route outside of the local network.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Bought an Epson on sale at a brick and mortar. Had ok reviews across the internet. It fucking blows. If you donâ(TM)t print a few documents a week, the ink clogs up and you wind up printing 10 sheets to clear it along with âoeclean ink nozzleâ functions a few times. If it runs to low on ANY ink, it refuses to print - even if itâ(TM)s a color ink and youâ(TM)re printing black and white! Ironically it says âoeyou can print in black and whiteâ but the only options that come up are âoechange cartridgeâ and âoecancel print.â Sucks sucks fuckin sucks.
Looking for a color laser MFP.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I have seen some very high-quality laser printouts (from very expensive printers), but a dye-sublimation printer might be more what you're looking for. Relatively expensive compared to inkjet printers, and even color laser printers, but I do see a few around Amazon in the 500-600 USD range.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I recently tried selling a generic brand, unused toner cartridge for an HP printer I no longer owned on the classifieds site kijiji. It was taken down within a day for a "Verified Rights Owner (VeRO)" complaint. In no point in the add did I try to pass it off as a genuine HP cartridge, and the picture I used to post it certainly made clear who's sticker it had on it. I did mention it was for HP printers, which I seemed relevant. I tried pushing back, but was told that any reference to "HP" would result in take down. I guess I'm back to boycotting HP.
Are there any printer manufacturers that aren't evil?
Is it any surprise that a printer started RMS on his holy crusade? Too bad it seems we are losing that that battle so completely.
Should be using toner and laser printers.
Even if you want to cheap out on printing, you're better off buying a monochrome laser and sending the occasional photo print order to Snapfish when needed. Even if you need color, color lasers have now come down dramatically in price.
Bonus: toner cartridges don't dry out, so if you don't print every day you no longer need to waste most of your liquid ink running the Deep Clean utility to unclog the heads.
Yes.
One benefit of the "inkjet scam" is that because the printers themselves are often sold at a loss and include a scanner, you can generally get an all-in-one printer for a fraction of the cost of just a flatbed scanner.
I personally use a laser printer for all my printing needs (that itself was a dirt-cheap closeout model for $40 but I've still not exhausted the included toner cartridge), but my inkjet printer I paid $18 for brand new and its never even printed a single sheet. I literally only use it as a document scanner. It's not a stellar scanner but it serves that purpose just fine.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I happen to own an Epson printer (which I just bought new ink for). Is there a way to know if my printer has been known to show this behavior before I install the new ink cartridges? I looked at the filing on the EFF page but it didn't list specific printers.
While one solution to the problem would be "throw the printer away and buy one from some other company", I'd prefer a solution that does not involve spending more money - after all, reduced consumer cost was supposed to be part of the goal here wasn't it?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Well, yeah, there is; what do you think the total-price-per-print is for a shitty consumer-grade printer (that requires proprietary ink cartridges) vs a workgroup laser printer??
Workloads are not the same, which is why you don't see "workgroup" class printers sitting on kitchen counters, printing the occasional school report or car wash coupon, where color is probably needed. Color inkjet has a much lower price of entry for this class of service and I don't think your average home user has a budget line item for printing costs that they slice down to "cost per click".
I have a Canon Imagepress C8000VP in our print shop that I could send jobs to. I still use a $90 Brother home-gamer laser that sits on my desk for little stuff because its faster to the first page out.
Stop using inkjet printers, they're trash unless you need photo printing. Laser printers are faster, more efficient, and cheaper in the long run... toner doesn't dry out like ink cartridges and printer manufacturers wouldn't risk alienating core business customers in such a competitive market by trying to pull this crap on laser printers. Color laser printing has advanced to the point that it's entirely adequate for everything short of desktop photo printing at reasonable prices. There's really no reason to use an inkjet anymore unless you're printing exclusively photos.
"The only potential difference in the market is the subscription model, where ink is included, and you pay for a certain number of prints per month. That offers an opportunity to be truly competitive."
You may not have had the...pleasure...of a copier lease. That's often the model used, so the hardware does tend to emphasize durability and actually sane consumables design(toner cartridges that aren't tightly coupled to transfer rollers, that sort of thing); but the vendors are utter dicks about basically everything else. Everything is gated behind a license key, including basic things like 'speak postscript'; 'value added' software like the various print management/document release/OCR integration stuff tends to be pretty janky; and the vendors have a relationship with their dealer networks and VARs unpleasantly reminiscent of the automobile industry.
Low end printers are utter trash by comparison; and companies that sell you toner cartridges, rather than 'managed print solutions', have an incentive to jerk you around on consumables that they often succumb to; but you don't get nonsense like having to pay your dealer to send a tech just to apply a firmware update; or having most of the actually useful configuration options locked behind a password that you don't receive.
This is more of a laser vs. inkjet thing than a cheap consumer trash vs. 'workgroup' thing; but the very low duty cycles of common home uses are really an unfortunate match for inkjets.
This isn't to say that expensive print-shop inkjets are bulletproof or anything; but the cheap inkjet that gets used maybe a couple of times a month seems to be magnificently good at being clogged or dried out(maybe it'll come back after a 'cleaning' that consumes a substantial percentage of the cartridge, maybe not; but hey, the print head is probably part of the cartridge anyway..); while cheap and awful laser printers work pretty well for infrequent use because you won't wear them out that way, the per-page cost matters less; and toner doesn't tend to dry out or degrade under home conditions.
Inkjets just don't scale down to really cheap or infrequently used as well. It took a while for the cost of entry to laser to fall; but it has now; and scaled-down lasers are worse than nice ones; but don't tend to have the same really awful character defects as scaled-down inkjets; which are just terrible.
If a friend or family asked me what printer to buy I used to have a few suggestions but now it's only Brother.
I have an Epson inkjet printer I use at home for infrequent printing of mostly B&W documents. Much to my dismay a few weeks ago, the printer refused to print a standard Word document because it was claiming the cyan cartridge was out. I had no color in the document and couldn't find a way around it locking out all printing until I replaced it. Further, once I did replace the cyan, it printed 1 B&W document and then shutdown again, claiming yellow was out. It seems Epson has a time-expiration on their cartridges, even if ink is still in them, and refuses to work until you feed the beast. Needless to say, when the printer dies, either naturally or by baseball bat, I won't be buying Epson again.
Screen Printer here! Laser doesn't work on transparent 13x19 sheets, and I need to print those daily:) Whats even more annoying is that even though I have everything set to black and white, and I literally only print black - my color ink cartridges run out a little faster than the black ones on my canon printer. Sneaky bastards.