Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink • Hacker News Board

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#291

Post by RealityVoid » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 7:07 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #226

ecpottinger wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. I remember in particular when the company I was with sold the Panasonic home printer. For a student is was great, but ALL the parts were made of the type of plastic that could not take heat in the long run. The user manual clearly said no more than 100 pages at a time and less than a 1000 a day, no problem for a student. Yet time after time someone would come in and want one for office work. We would p…

Yep. Duty cycle, as an engineering concept, is notoriously misunderstood by the general public. It seems every day that there's some sort of outrage in a blog or article: "Did you know that [large organization] spends $[x] for their [equipment]? Wow, you can buy [consumer version] at Walmart for 1/100th of that price!" No, outraged taxpayer, your school district isn't wasting money by purchasing a $10,000 copier. You…

I am still skeptic, honestly, are some metal gears worth the 20x-10x cost increase? Yes, you can make it more suited for long term use for _some_ cost, but that much? At what point is is actually fleecing customers? Some products surely are just fleecing, but how can you tell? Usually, you can't.

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#292

Post by moonchrome » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

alerighi wrote: post #18

I stopped buying inkjet printers. They are a scam, the ink costs a fortune and they are built as cheap as they can, meaning that they will break and you have to throw them away because they are impossible to repair, they are slow and when you need them they don't work because they were not used for too much time. After having 5 broken printers in the garage I said enough, that is a useless waste, and invested some mo…

Laser scanner combos are huge compared to an inkjet.

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#293

Post by cabalamat » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 7:14 PM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #217

EvanAnderson wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fed a diet of the necessary consumables-- toners/drums, fusers, rollers, separation pads, etc-- a 1990s LaserJet will outlive us all. For me, "peak LaserJet" was probably the LaserJet 4 w/ an integral JetDirect. The 4000 that followed was pretty solid and faster but more plastic-ey than the 4.

Not surprising at all--HP in the early 1990s was still very much an engineering-focused company (both H and P were on the board until `93) that made high-quality, durable products. This was right before it got gobbled up by MBAs and celebrity CEOs, who spun it off into a hundred subunits hawking flimsy plastic trinkets and "business consulting".

Agreed. I used to have a DeskJet 500 which I sadly got rid of years ago. It had much better build quality than modern inkjet printers.

> This was right before it got gobbled up by MBAs and celebrity CEOs, who spun it off into a hundred subunits hawking flimsy plastic trinkets and "business consulting".

Indeed. Very sad.

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#294

Post by dvdkhlng » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #234

alerighi wrote: post #18

I stopped buying inkjet printers. They are a scam, the ink costs a fortune and they are built as cheap as they can, meaning that they will break and you have to throw them away because they are impossible to repair, they are slow and when you need them they don't work because they were not used for too much time. After having 5 broken printers in the garage I said enough, that is a useless waste, and invested some mo…

I think that not buying printers is the correct answer, difficult to get everyone to do it, but it is the metric most likely to change behavior. Inkjet technology is fine, it was the exploitation of it by HP which lead to copy cats that really made it ridiculous. I've got an HP inkjet wide format plotter (36" wide) that was built both before HP was all in on ink as a profit center and built by a different division (p…

Can second the praise for the Epson Eco-Tank printers. Ink is cheap and lasts extremely long. Also I never had any problem with clogged nozzles etc which I used to face frequently on the cheaper printers. (though my Eco-Tank printer is black-and-white only which maybe alleviates many of those problems).

Also the integrated scanner worked out-of-the box for me under Debian, after I compiled and installed utsushi [1] from sources (edit: I'm only scanning from the utsushi command-line, no experience WRT integration with sane etc.).

[1] https://gitlab.com/utsushi/utsushi

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#295

Post by lazide » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #174

ethbr0 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the average printer purchaser: "Hello Best Buy / Staples / Office Depot salesperson, I need a printer." "Well, I'd recommend (insert whichever manufacturer currently cutting retail most margin)." "No, a friend had a bad experience with them." "Oh, then (insert second highest margin)." (Repeat)

Meanwhile the most economical printers aren’t even on the shelf because their high purchase price causes them to have low sales volumes.

Yup, though those tend to be purchased by large corps in bulk via industrial channels, so the companies still make good money.

Most large corps have done the math and know their TCO all in is much lower (since they have the scale that they need to hire staff and explicitly account for dealing with issues like printer problems).

The printer companies have also done their market research and math, and know how much they can squeeze out of these corps while still having the math clearly make sense for them.

Can you imagine the logistical and end user support nightmare if they gave everyone their own cheap inkjets? Lolz.

It’s bad enough as it is, and per-page the problems are way less frequent.

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#296

Post by progbits » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #124

osrec wrote: post #22

Damn the need for recurring revenue. It makes us make bad things that eat away at our own resources. I wished there was an alternative payment model, where everything is perhaps paid off over time. If the product fails during the specified time period, the payments stop. It would hopefully give the companies some sort of recurring revenue, while incentivising them to build something that lasts and not play dirty tric…

> Damn the need for recurring revenue. They'd still be thriving under an honest business model. There is no need for any of this. There is only greed.

The problem is nobody cares about long term sustainable growth.

Execs come and go and want a nice fat bonus now. Shareholders will jump ship to a different company that does this and manages to go more up-and-to-the-right. This bubbles down the whole chain - it is the PMs and teams who push for change, redesign etc who get promoted, not the ones who just continue making a good product that will last.

You don't have anyone who sticks around for many years and is passionate about the problem and doing the right thing. And even if you do, in a public company they get pushed out by CEO who promises more immediate growth.

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#297

Post by lazide » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

RealityVoid wrote: post #291

kube-system wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Duty cycle, as an engineering concept, is notoriously misunderstood by the general public. It seems every day that there's some sort of outrage in a blog or article: "Did you know that [large organization] spends $[x] for their [equipment]? Wow, you can buy [consumer version] at Walmart for 1/100th of that price!" No, outraged taxpayer, your school district isn't wasting money by purchasing a $10,000 copier. You…

I am still skeptic, honestly, are some metal gears worth the 20x-10x cost increase? Yes, you can make it more suited for long term use for _some_ cost, but that much? At what point is is actually fleecing customers? Some products surely are just fleecing, but how can you tell? Usually, you can't.

It isn’t that the metal gears alone are worth 10-20x. It is that if you do the math over a long period of time, use it somewhat often, and include things like your time (at any reasonable labor rate) fixing issues, tracking down replacements, etc. it almost always makes sense to have something that will have fewer issues, last longer, and is designed to be more durable even at greater expense. In things with moving parts, that may mean metal gears and reinforcement in wear areas, but not always.

This of course depends on how frequently you are going to use it, how hard, for what, and how severe or expensive the consequences of it breaking on you unexpectedly are.

‘Commercial’ or ‘pro grade’ is usually more durable and expensive because the market demands it - employees are often harder on equipment than someone who bought it directly, it gets used at a much higher duty cycle, maintenance is often neglected at least as much as a residential user, etc. and the market is willing to pay more because it breaking stops them from making money, or requires them to spend more money on labor getting it fixed.

They also tend to have horrible UX or require specific steps to work, since they know it is being bought for it’s utility not because it is pretty (most of the time), and someone will have to figure out how to use it or get figured after the company is already paid.

They still do get scammed sometimes of course.

The printer equivalent of harbor freight tools has a place if you’re going to toss it in a year anyway due to a move, or need it for a single job and then never again, as long as it isn’t a safety/critical path item anyway.

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#298

Post by FireBeyond » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #101

alerighi wrote: post #18

I stopped buying inkjet printers. They are a scam, the ink costs a fortune and they are built as cheap as they can, meaning that they will break and you have to throw them away because they are impossible to repair, they are slow and when you need them they don't work because they were not used for too much time. After having 5 broken printers in the garage I said enough, that is a useless waste, and invested some mo…

Inkjet printers can do a fantastic job of printing photos and color documents, and maybe four times a year I would really like to do that at home. Unfortunately nobody seems to have built an inkjet printer with nozzles that don't gunk up, and cleaning the nozzles doesn't work very well and uses more ink and time than the document you wanted to print in the first place. It's probably possible to design an inkjet print…

Canon's imagePrograf series don't gunk up, but they will use a lot of ink cleaning. It's also their most expensive model of inkjet (my Pro 1000 will print 17" wide, but is $1,300).

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#299

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

shawn-butler wrote: post #277

jacquesm wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on the 4, those things were indestructible. I had two in the office in IJmuiden, ended up donating one when our main HQ moved to Canada. Both the donated one and the one that I still have are still running today. Toner cartridges are still available, both the originals (a bit pricey) and lots of aftermarket options for about half the price of the branded one. I fully expect the one I have to outlast me, the ot…

I have a 4L but the paper feed has weird jam issues over time.

Check the alignment of the paper feed sprockets, likely there is some remnant of an old sheet of paper in there or a bunch of lint. You do need to maintain such a device over the longer period, it's not exactly magic!

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#300

Post by kitsunesoba » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 7:28 PM UTC

centizen wrote: post #271

neilv wrote: post #173

As many techies will probably always say anytime inkjet product shenanigans come up: just buy a laser printer. And I now add: and don't let it connect to the Internet, and don't install proprietary drivers or software for it on your computers. Also, remember the names of companies doing sketchy things, and do your part to provide negative feedback when you can, and to give positive feedback to better companies. (Exam…

Canon was actually on my short list of printer vendors I would have recommended people to use. Now it's just down to Brother and Kyocera I guess.

Even Brother is dodgy, depending on the model. I have a low-midrange Brother B&W laser printer that worked great until one day it decided to stop accepting print jobs, both via network and USB… it just stalls at “processing” and never proceeds. Googling around it seems like people with various Brother models have seen this behavior.