How to revert HP printer’s ban on 3rd-party ink cartridges

Why hasn't there been a class action lawsuit yet?

Maybe? But their experiences do match mine. I bought a cheap Brother printer laserjet a few years ago. I needed the occasional B&W print job and plugged in the ethernet port. It worked out of the box for Debian and Windows, no special drivers needed. (I used to have to have some strange binary, but that hasn't been necessary anymore).

I don't remember the last time I exchanged out the toner cartridge (Maybe it's the first one? But I think I did have to exchange it at some point.), and it works reliably everytime I need to print. For $100, that isn't bad.

For another reference, I also bought one for my old college lab in ~2008-2009. I went back for a visit in 2019, and it was still there and it was working fine.

I get what you mean though, it seems in every printer thread the Brother recommendations have popped up.

There is definitely lots of DRM-type stuff happening in laser printers, mostly on the higher end. It goes beyond just 3rd party, too.

The best example I've heard from this was from {large-copier-manufacturer}. Someone (not an official dealer) in the middle east had purchased a truckload of copiers and cartridges in a fire sale from a business in the UK that was closing. They sold these copiers locally, of course undercutting regular local prices. Everything was fine until all the customers needed new toner, which they purchased locally, and suddenly got errors telling them the toner was incompatible.

What happened is while the copiers themselves are the same globally, the cartridges are region-encoded. The first time the copier powers on, it does a write-once setting to region-lock itself to whatever cartridge is installed. There's apparently no factory reset or software change to modify this setting (in the name of security), so the only fix was either to import cartridge from the UK (which the official dealers can't even do) or replace the mainboard to fully reset the thing back to how it comes from the factory.

Another possibility is they're trapped by other agreements that prevent them from voting with their wallet.

The obvious example is predatory MSPs where they talk their customers into certain printers and sell them ink. A 10% commission on a $600 set of toners is easy money compared to a $150 set of toners where a 10% ($15) commission isn't even possible.

The other less obvious one is franchises. Part of the franchise agreement will include having corporate be the supplier for all the lease hold improvements, all the furnishing, office supplies, etc., plus all of the ongoing consumables. It's sold as consistency to protect the brand, but a lot of it is about increasing profits for the corporate side at the expense of their franchisees. I've seen it first hand.

In the case I saw, I knew someone who bought into a franchise and asked me about some of the tech stuff. The franchise sold them cheap products with too much markup, but the most egregious was the printer. They were sold a cheap inkjet printer and they were buying 2-3 sets of cartridges per month. That's $3000-4000 per year (CAD) for printing. It may not sound like much, but this was a small business where they were hoping for $30k-$60k of (owner absent) annual profit.

The reason behind that is twofold. First, the franchises are easier to sell because the upfront costs are lower and the purchaser usually doesn't realize the trade-off is higher ongoing and total (lifetime) operating costs. The second is because the franchise supplier is making money off of those higher ongoing costs. It's awful for the franchisees and many of them don't realize what's happening until they're all-in.

TLDR; It's predators all the way down :-(

Interesting. I have the exact same printer (HP Color LaserJet M254dw) and was curious to see if it automatically updated itself. The firmware datecode on my printer, 20190807, is even older than what the author downgraded to.

I'm not sure if I turned auto updates off when I set the printer up. I did go through most of the configuration UI via a web browser and know that I switched it to "IT-managed" mode - maybe that turned off auto updates. The printer is on a VLAN that connects to the internet, but I've turned off every option that sounds like it reaches out to a cloud service.

Overall, this is a decent printer for me. It seems to meet all of my requirements - I can leave it unused for long periods and it will still wake up and print as soon as I tell it to. It's a laser printer, so no worries about clogged nozzles/dried up ink. There are four individual toner cartridges, so no need to a set of three colours because one ran out. Windows and MacOS both discovered the printer on the network and automatically figured out the drivers.

Printers generally suck, but this one doesn't seem to suck too badly.