I guess it's time due for a rerun of Ken Thomson's reverse engineering of Mergenthaler Linotron.
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/summer.reconstructed.pd...
HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
101–110 of 308 posts
Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
#102Are 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...
Honestly I'd be pretty happy with some kind of open source impact printer. All I use them for is putting words on a page.
Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
#103I don't know how the DRM works on ink cartridges, but if all the off-brand cartridges just use the same mass-produced cloned DRM "chip" (or whatever it is), it not possible this is actually caused by a certificate expiring rather than an intentionally malicious act by HP?
I really don't have any clue what I'm talking about, just wondering if there's any alternative cause whatsoever.
Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
#104So what is a good brand of laser printers that work well under Linux and accepts unofficial toners?
Brother. Look for:
- BRScript3 (their clone of PostScript)
- ethernet port
- a "D" on the end means it can print on both sides, duplexing. It's slower but oh so much more convenient.
Printers with all these features start around $100.
Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
#105Reverse engineering is a must in this case. I cannot be accepted that you got an HP printer and now you cannot use generic ink.
I never liked HP but now, no way I will consider to buy HP products at all.
Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
#106Is there any legitimate reason to be buying an inkjet versus a laser? I would personally never buy an inkjet again in my life regardless of the brand.
Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
#107As an aside, does anyone remember the last time they were happy with ANY HP product? Everytime I see that logo I get chills knowing what a pain in the ass it's going to be. Edit: I am specifically thinking about HPSM, and HPNA here.
The hardware labs at uni had a couple of ancient (to us -- probably 80s hardware being used in the mid-2000s?) HP logic analyzers with Z80 bus probes.
They turned out to be much more reliable and easier to use than the modern USB pod things also provided which plugged into a Windows box to display the analysis traces.
Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
#108This isn't even remotely surprising. in early 2000's work had 5 heavy duty color laser printers from HP to print B&W letters on. All carts stopped working after a certain page count. Even if the color wasn't used it would decrement the counter. We threw out THOUSANDS of full color toner cartridges.
Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
#109I'm fairly sure this is illegal in the EU under one of the e-waste directives.
Yes, cartridges fall under the WEEE Directive.
What do you think is the best way to enforce the rules on HP and make this action illegal? Contact the Member State authorities? Feel this should be enforced by the EU instead of national... gah, directives.
Re: HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
#110There'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.
The only problem of epson is it sounds like (from the reviews) that they have bad Wireless support which is kind of a must for some people like me who use their phone to print.