HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers • Hacker News Board

Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

#21

Post by woliveirajr » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 7:14 AM UTC

Laser OKI color printer isn't different.

Each toner (CMYK) has a life based on printed pages and stop working even if there's toner inside. No third part supplier, because the printer won't recognize it. And it's useless torefill it if you don't change some chip in each toner.

And then the fusor will also stop after some number of pages, no matter if the quality was still good. To replace it you spend more than you paid for the printer.

So OKI was in my banned list, now HP joins it.

Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

#22

Post by kpil » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 7:15 AM UTC

How is this legal?

As a side note, HP sells a (vintage) 256 MB DDR2 RAM module for $600 (USD) for it's new printers.

Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

#23

Post by Nullabillity » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 7:21 AM UTC

m3adow wrote: post #16

Animats wrote: post #7

There's the Epson Eco-Tank series. Ink is in four bottles at the side of the machine, good for about 4000-6000 pages. Refill with Epson ink bottles or (a bit more messily) from bulk ink. The printer costs about $279. You do have to clean the print heads occasionally. That's the price of long life print heads.

How is the Linux support for Epson printers? The big thing for HP is their good support for Linux.

"Good" Linux support means being able to just download a PPD and shove it into CUPS. AFAIK HP is the only one that requires their own crappy GUI on top.

Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

#24

Post by denzell » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 7:22 AM UTC

how is this legal? It's akin to a car shutting down if a non genuine part is used.

Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

#25

Post by tome » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 7:24 AM UTC

Nullabillity wrote: post #23

m3adow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the Linux support for Epson printers? The big thing for HP is their good support for Linux.

"Good" Linux support means being able to just download a PPD and shove it into CUPS. AFAIK HP is the only one that requires their own crappy GUI on top.

I've had a couple of HP printers on Linux and they didn't require a GUI.

Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

#26

Post by azarias » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 7:33 AM UTC

Can confirm, this happened to our HP 6830 printer on September 13. Extremely annoyed because we only bought this printer in June, and was working fine with a replacement ink. I was actually researching legal precedents to this, and learned that Lexmark has been fighting something like this in court for over a decade[1].

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160214/16294133605/after...

Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

#27

Post by midnitewarrior » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 7:35 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #4

Are there any open hardware printers in the making? I seem to recall some open hardware cell phone projects. No reason a similar effort couldn't be directed towards making an open printer, is there? Also, it might not even require making a full open hardware printer, but just some key circuitry and maybe some drivers, right?

HP and others have a lot of patents in that space with an army of lawyers to defend them unfortunately. It would have to avoid using anything coming close to these patents...

Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

#28

Post by proctor » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 7:38 AM UTC

This kind of reminds me of how some of these companies disable the scanner portion of "All-in-One" type printers if the printer portion is out of ink.

Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

#29

Post by azarias » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 7:42 AM UTC

eggy wrote: post #6

I haven't owned and HP printer in a while, but this article will stop me from making an HP printer my next purchase if and when I need one. What a dirty, cheap tactic by HP! They'll fire some low-wage earner worker and a mid-level manager over this, while the real culprit stays at his job I'm sure. Definitely class-action, and even criminal, no? Consumer fraud, deception? Third-party replacements are running fine in…

HP just agreed to buy Samsung's printing business.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/12/hp-is-buying-samsungs-prin...

Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

#30

Post by pipio21 » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 7:46 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #4

Are there any open hardware printers in the making? I seem to recall some open hardware cell phone projects. No reason a similar effort couldn't be directed towards making an open printer, is there? Also, it might not even require making a full open hardware printer, but just some key circuitry and maybe some drivers, right?

Not really, there are reverse engineering efforts like this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nicholasclewis/inkshiel...

But there are not Open source inkject printers because it takes millions to manufacture the inkjet itself.