Ink Cartridges with Built-In Self-Destruct Dates 655
Linker3000 writes "The Inquirer has an article about HP ink cartridges having a built-in expiry date that can cause them to become unusable even if they aren't empty! Another twist on the 'chipped cartridge' stories--and also another kick in the teeth (and wallet) for the consumer methinks." This isn't really a new problem - here's a good piece about the problem.
Let's not forget... (Score:5, Informative)
This just adds to a list of reasons why I will never, ever, own a printer again [instructio...uals.co.uk]...
Re:All these fancy ink and 'laser' printers (Score:3, Informative)
I've Had Full Cartriges Go Bad for Years (Score:5, Informative)
I appreciate HP's support of Linux and would like to support them, but I stopped buying their printers a few years ago. There's just too many little quirks. The last one I had ran the paper through at a slight angle. I don't think I've seen an HP printer I felt I really trusted since the original Deskjet and Deskjet 500.
Hal
Re:It's a free market. (Score:3, Informative)
If you continue to buy HP inkjets then you obviously don't really care and deserve everything you get.
Re:It's a free market. (Score:5, Informative)
They're playing with fire if they do that; printer manufacturers are already under investigation for anticompetitive practices by the EU. If they have any sense, they'll back off fast.
RTFA, then use a brain cell (Score:4, Informative)
1) HP bought Compaq.
2) Last Year.
3) The print cartridge was manufactured 4.5 years ago.
Doesn't make much difference in practice (Score:4, Informative)
I print only very occasionally, maybe a few pages per week or month, sometimes not at all for 1 or 2 months. I was tired to throwing away 90% filled but dry ink cartidges and therefore switched to a laser printer. They work even if you print a page after months without use.
Re:All these fancy ink and 'laser' printers (Score:2, Informative)
Printronix [printronix.com]
Tally [tallyus.com]
OKI [okidata.com]
Done Before (Score:1, Informative)
My Epson printer did this too... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Brady Law (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think it would apply to this printer situation. In fact, there are plenty of parts on a car that are pretty much only made by the manufacturer of the car because of some mechanism used to key or enable. For an example, think about the Engine Control Unit which handles keeping your engine running properly.
Tuners reverse engineer these all the time to build new throttle/air/fuel maps and the like. So far, I've not heard of the DMCA being invoked against these tuners, but who knows what will happen.
Re:Where is the competition? (Score:5, Informative)
Individual clear ink tanks, no chips, and the tank senses when it is empty with a little photocell (no ink counter). The printhead is user-replaceable if you really screw up. The printer was not cheap, but it has more than paid for itself by using cheap 3rd party inks.
Re:It's a free market. (Score:2, Informative)
You really can't blame the companys that try to get the money the invested by selling a printers below its worth back through the sale of ink cartriges.
Also by now I think there would be a market for 'normal priced' printers that work with dirt cheap ink. But currently only laser printers work somewhat like that.
Re:It's a free *market*. (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, companies that can manufacture ink jet cartridges (relatively small products) but cannot manufacture their own printers can be locked out of the market, eliminating consumers' ability to choose to buy from these smaller companies.
Re:It's not a free market (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's a free market. (Score:5, Informative)
Try Canon, for one. The S750 I purchased last summer uses the same non-chipped ink tanks as most of their other new-line home and small office printers, so even though I don't see the S750 on their web site any more, I'm pretty sure that they will be making their ink this way for some time to come.
(It's a very good printer, besides, if you were wondering for your own reference... Prints fast (I don't have a ppm count... not nosebleed fast, but notably faster than my roommate's HP), works well with the gimp-print drivers if you use Linux, prints photos well enough for my eyes, and has all sorts of other bells and whistles.)
Offset by the cost of a slightly more pricey printer ($140), the ink is pretty inexpensive. The black cartridge will set you back $15; the full set of three color cartridges costs $30. Canon ink comes in transparent plastic "dumb" cartridges that are completely sucked dry when the driver tells you they're empty... the printer won't cheat you out of any of it, as it actually measures how much ink is left in the tank rather than using HP or Epson style guesswork.
There are a few other non-evil printer manufacturers, I'm sure, but Canon seems to be the best as far as I've heard. Any other suggestions, anyone?
Re:This Has To Be Stopped (Score:2, Informative)
Actually there is; it is exactly the DMCA which does this, and there is already caselaw (in the Lexmark/SCC case) to support it. The legal theory was this:
Lexmark claims copyright to the software within the printers they manufacture.
Lexmark claims that a chip in the (high end) ink cartridges they manufacture serves as an access control mechanism, controlling access to a portion of their copyrighted material (software supporting extended high-end functions) in their printer.
Static Control Components reverse engineered and created a workalike chip which could be used to convince a Lexmark printer that the non-Lexmark ink cartridge installed was a genuine Lexmark ink cartridge, and should therefore be granted full access to the copyrighted software functions.
The DMCA prohibits the manufacture of devices which bypass access control mechanisms to digital copyrighted material.
The judge agreed that SCC's actions amounted to a violation.
This is not about warranty service. It's about HP using embedded software to control the products they manufacture after the sale. As more and more products are manufactured with an embedded software component, we will likely see more and more of this behavior. Remember; software will always by loyal to whomever wrote it. Unless stopped, this means we may eventually see ACME cars that just don't run quite as well unless you're using ACME gasoline. As consumers we will make that choice, and have to live with it.
Here's a question for you; If I wanted to manufacture $10,000 ink cartridges for Lexmark printers with the feature of having "just the right shade of black", and could find a market for my ink cartridges, should the law prevent my sale? As written, the DMCA allows Lexmark to block my entry to this market, even if Lexmark has no intention of entering that market themselves.
Re:My Epson printer did this too... (Score:2, Informative)
The HP problem is more sinister because it disables the cartridge itself.
Re:Isn't this illegal (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Brady Law (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Time To Expiration (Score:3, Informative)
Besides who gave HP (or you for that matter) the right to decide who needs a printer, and who doesn't. People choose to have a printer for their own reasons, regardless of whether or not they need one...
Re:What [Cheap] Printers *dont* suck? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's a free market. (Score:5, Informative)
It really isn't on purpose! (Score:5, Informative)
The ink has many chemicals in it, many that don't want to stick together. The lighter elements in the ink tend to evaporate, turning the ink into a thick sludge. The sludge, as you can imagine, has a hard time passing through the nozzles of the print head. This has always has been issue since at least 1996, when we got our first high-end inkjet printers. At that time, you could expect the shelf life of the cart. to be about 6-10 months. In fact, back in those days, stores would occasionally sell you old stock, and there were no date codes printed on the ink carts. You were SOL if you got an "old stock" cart, because HP said it was too old. At least now HP will warrany ANY non-empty ink cart that has a date stamp before the expiry date on the cart.
Think about it-- faster evaporation times on paper mean the ink doesn't soak the paper as much. You can get brigher brights, darker darks, etc. These chemicals in the ink don't magically want to evaporate only once they hit the paper. They always want to evaporate. Remember the $800 inkjet from not so long ago that had a halogen heater? It was to speed up the chemical reaction.
I could understand if the date codes started inching closer and closer-- to like just a month or two weeks. (Keep the ink in the freezer next to the t-bones, anyone? yeah, right)
I don't believe the ink has been engineered to have a shelf-life. It may be that they're in no hurry to improve their shelf-life, but it is nothing new. The date code is to help prevent customers from getting old stock. There may be better alternatives to this kind ink out now, but they're building on their ink research from 10 years ago.. which means it is probably also the cheapest technology. So if you want to claim that for the last decade, HP has been plotting this scheme to get more ink dollars out of people, we'd better put on our tinfoil hats.
Re:It's a free market. (Score:3, Informative)
> Problem is that once a company like HP sets a presidence like this others will think they can follow.
And that opens the door for companies like XFX, Goldstar, Leadtek, et. al. to enter the market and make cheap knockoffs without these limitations. Companies like this feed off of higher priced competitor products.
Re:My Epson printer did this too... (Score:2, Informative)
Most printers use colour when printing black colours to give it a more vivid look.
It sucks sometimes, you wonder where all your colour goes when you were just print off black resumes by the hundreds.
Re:It's a free market. (Score:5, Informative)
Not so. This is a simplistic, 19th century model which has been improved upon quite a bit in the last century.
Current economic theory does take into account irrational decisions, but on the whole individual irrational economic decisions do little to affect the economics of the entire population. There will always be some people acting irrationally, but on the whole most will make rational decisions most of the time, the end result of which drives the free market.
Note that a 'rational decision' also requires accurate information. If the population is given incorrect information (either deliberately or otherwise) it will act irrationally because the information available tells it that the irrational is actually rational.
The thing to keep in mind here is that there is no capitalistic model at work in any country in the world (with the possible exception of tiny places like Andorra - couldn't tell you about these mini-nations). Even the 'capitalist' economy of the United States is heavily socialized and government-controlled, although the government control often works opposite to that of fascism (i.e., instead of the government giving orders to corporations, it's usually the other way around). We have no idea - none whatsoever - how a capitalistic free market would work because we don't have any capitalistic free markets to examine. A socialistic, oligarchical corporate state does not a free market make.
So it makes no sense to criticize capitalism or the free market. You do not live in a capitalistic country, and you don't have a free market.
Max
Re:batteries have expiration functions why not ink (Score:4, Informative)
HP, however, seems to have chosen to make the expiration date manditory. Don't care about degraded print quality? Too bad, buy a new cartiridge. In my mind, it would be perfectly ok for HP to do what you mention compaq and sun have done: Warn the user that the cartiridge has reached the end of its life-expectancy so the user can make an informed decision regarding whether to replace the cartiridge or to continue using it.
Re:That is why... (Score:3, Informative)
And you damn well ought to have!
SoGA requires all goods to match the description on the box or in any advertising, to be of satisfactory quality - (ie. they must work and last a reasonable length of time), and they must be fit for the purpose they were sold under.
The company cannot claim that breaching the wrapping violates your rights as the goods were clearly not of satisfactory quality.
And it is the store not the manufacturer who must sort out the problem - your contract is with the store. Nor does claiming a problem under SoGA violate your warranty terms since the manufacturer's warranty is in addition to any rights in the SoGA.
It's an incredibly powerful piece of law (and far stronger than US legislation in the same area), just mentioning the words 'Sale of Goods Act' is usually a good way of getting a company seriously worried. They usually back down there and then, but if you then mention the local trading standards office (in the phone book), they will get VERY worried. Trading standards are the last people you want to cross...
Anyway UKers, read up on the Sale of Goods Act 1979, know your rights and use them. Don't take all the crap stores try to fob you off with about shrink wrap, misuse and 90 day warranties.
IIRC the only physical purchases not covered by SoGA are houses, which live in a legal minefield all of their own.
UK Consumer Rights [consumer.gov.uk]
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:It's a free market. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The Brady Law (Score:4, Informative)
Engine control is not exactly rocket science. My ECU has a 3MHz microcontroller and some counters on it, and that's pretty much it. Then there's a fuel map, a little 2d chart that says at so many RPMs and so much airflow, supply this much fuel, and keep adding more until the speed matches the throttle position. Admittedly, there's a bit more to it, like monitoring the O2 sensor and making the mixture richer or leaner or adjusting timing (usually the latter) to ensure that the maximum amount of fuel is burned, leading to higher efficiency and thus lower emissions, but you must realize that to just get a car to run and develop power you don't need to do all that shit. Cars were making hundreds of horsepower through forced induction before the invention of fuel injection, even. Check out some old studebakers if you don't believe me.
Tuners do reverse engineer that stuff, but there's really no need to because you can do it somewhat by the dimensions of the engine and somewhat by trial and error, especially watching the O2 sensor output. It becomes slightly more complex when you add in VTEC and the like because for staged VVT you must have two maps for different cam profiles, and for phased VVT you can adjust the timing much more broadly, but all of that can be reduced to relatively simple formulas, all of which will be adjusted by the sensor inputs.
Anyway even for VTEC (and other VVT, everyone seems to have it these days) you can replace the computer entirely, without doing any reverse engineering whatsoever, and just start from a basic set of assumptions about what an engine of that bore, stroke, and compression ratio will need in the way of fuel and air, and design a map accordingly.