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Epson Programs Some Printers To Stop Operating, Claiming Danger of 'Ink Spills' (substack.com) 182

Posted by EditorDavid from the wait-for-the-toner dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: Printer maker Epson has programmed some models of its inkjet printers to "stop operating" at a pre-determined time, citing the risk of property damage linked to "ink spills," the Fight to Repair newsletter reports.

Epson printer owners have complained that their functioning printers have suddenly stopped working, displaying an error message declaring that a component of the printer has "reached the end of its service life" and that the device needs to be serviced. According to Epson's website, the message is linked to ink pads, which Epson describes as "porous pads in the printer that collect, distribute, and very importantly contain the ink that is not used on printed pages." Over time, these pads become saturated with ink though generally not "before the printer is replaced for other reasons" (??!)

"Like so many other products, all Epson consumer ink jet products have a finite life span due to component wear during normal use... The printers are designed to stop operating at the point where further use without replacing the ink pads could create risks of property damage from ink spills or safety issues related to excess ink contacting an electrical component," the company said on its website.

Rather than measure the saturation of the ink pads to determine when that point is reached, however, Epson appears to have programmed a counter on its printers that disables the device when a threshold has been reached. For printer owners who use Windows, Epson makes a reset utility that can reset the counter though it can "only be used once and will allow printing for a short period of time." For Mac users, or Windows users who have already run the reset utility once, Epson urges them to have the printer serviced by an Epson authorized service shop or — preferably — to replace the printer with a new printer. "Repair may not be a cost-effective option for lower-cost printers because other components may also be near the end of their usable life," the company said. Despite the company's claims about the unfixability of the ink pad issue, YouTube videos suggest that the ink pads are, in fact, simple to replace, as this video illustrates.

Some legal experts say that Epson's hard coding an end of life for its printers may be illegal — an example of "Deceptive trade practices," unless it is clearly disclosing the existence of the programmed end of life to consumers prior to purchase.
Here's how the Fight to Repair newsletter sees the situation. Epson "pushes its customers to throw away the entire, working printer unit simply because some sponges are saturated with ink.

"In doing so, the company amplifies our epidemic of e-waste and forces customers into an expensive and (as it turns out) unneeded upgrade."
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Epson Programs Some Printers To Stop Operating, Claiming Danger of 'Ink Spills' More

Epson Programs Some Printers To Stop Operating, Claiming Danger of 'Ink Spills'

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  • Middle-management stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06, 2022 @11:01PM (#62768250)

    Want to do something useful today? Write Epson and tell them that this is not acceptable.

    It makes no sense to come up with the "ink tank" idea and then pull stupid stuff like this. If ink pads are a problem, they should've engineered the thing to make ink pad replacement certificably end-user replaceable instead. Artificial device death is not acceptable, and we'll just have to (gleefully, if you wish) hammer that into any manufacturer until they get it.

    • I don't think writing to a company that does something like this would be useful. They know very well that it is unacceptable but they can get away with it. If one can trick the system and reset the counter, that would be useful.

    • Better Idea (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2022 @02:15AM (#62768388)
      I have a better idea: spread this information to as much as people possible so nobody will buy an Epson product anymore. Remember sons, corporations only listen to $$$, not whinny letters.

    • Re:Middle-management stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @03:02AM (#62768422)
      Want to do something useful today? Don't buy scam-enabling inkjets. Laser printers produce vastly better quality printouts, and third-party toner cartridges cost essentially nothing per page, as opposed to inkjet ink which costs more than Chanel #5. For the best deal, get a swapped-out office-grade laser printer, built like a tank and since the total cost is up-front you pay very little for the consumables. I've got a > 10-year-old ex-business Kyocera that I've run 10,000+ pages through without any problems, and that may well outlast me. My neighbour is on about her fifth crap inkjet, where one set of cartridges cost her more than my entire printer did.

      • Re:Middle-management stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jsonn ( 792303 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @03:20AM (#62768446)
        Laser printers are better for text and if you don't care about color precision all that much. For photos, a good ink jet still is significantly better as it can have a much wider color space. That's naturally the medium triple digit price range of course, so not your average "cartridge is more expensive than the printer" device.

        • For photos, a good ink jet still is significantly better as it can have a much wider color space.

          Sure, but how many people print the sort of things that need that? You can't print photos on normal paper anyway. Most people I know go to the local mall with a USB stick when they want to print some photos.

          It's madness to print out PDFs and shopping lists using carefully color-graded inks that cost more than Chanel #5.

          • You can't print photos on normal paper anyway.

            And that's relevant why? If you want a printer to print a high quality there's a good chance that you bought the appropriate stationary. There are still plenty of people who want / require quality prints.

            Most people I know go to the local mall with a USB stick when they want to print some photos.

            Same, but they are those who have laser printers at home. I also know people who don't.

            • There are still plenty of people who want / require quality prints.

              I never said there weren't.

              I'm questioning why we have to print our school homework using such expensive ink.

              Where are the inkjets with inks that can't print photos and where the prints are going to fade in 20 years time? Surely they should be really cheap and widely available?

              Or maybe this is all just a big con by printer makers.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jsonn ( 792303 )
            I don't know how many people need it. But there are use cases for ink jets, and laser printers have their limits. A tank-based ink jet is comparable in price per page to most laser printers. They can be comparable in speed for regular color prints to classic laser (non-led) printers too. Those are not the entry level scams of course, but you get what you pay for. Can we please just stop with the black and white view of the world?

        • Re:Middle-management stupidity (Score:5, Informative)

          by Arnonyrnous Covvard ( 7286638 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @07:44AM (#62768722)
          Inkjet printers are better than lasers at printing photos, but they're still rubbish at that too. If you need/want photo prints, have them lab printed. The results are world's apart visually, much more durable and cheaper too. The only drawback is that you don't get that sweet instant gratification, but you have to lie pretty convincingly to yourself to believe that that outweighs all the times you want to take a sledgehammer to the printer when it gargles with one of the most expensive liquids and then still won't print correctly or it tells you it did that too often so you need to buy a new printer because the sponge is full. Don't buy an inkjet printer, even if you want photos.

          • world's apart

            I apologize for that. I'll have may head checked at the earliest convenience.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jsonn ( 792303 )
            You have absolutely no idea about semi-professional to professional ink jets, do you? Hint: they give you a quality comparable to labs. The ink can be bought in bottles and costs less than the paper. You will often have a second (or even third) black as well. Stop judging every ink jet by the 50USD racket.
            • Even a $1000 inkjet printer that people buy for the print quality is rubbish at making photo prints. Remember that we're talking about printers which refuse to print when the waste ink sponge is "full" here, not some industrial grade device which is designed and used for at least tens of thousands of prints a month. But even those don't stand a chance against print technologies better suited for photo printing.

              If you want quality photo prints, you don't buy a printer for it, you have them printed. A laser

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by jsonn ( 792303 )

                Let's pick a product fitting the price range, right? The Epson ET-8550 is used by professional photographers for printing their work for exhibitions or small scale sale. It costs under 1000USD. Furthermore, It's not used for thousands of prints a month, more like a dozen a day at most as a quality print takes time. It is meant for affordable photo printing and delivers that.

                Does it have some sponge somewhere that might fill up? Sure. The difference to the scam devices is that it is serviceable part and th

          • Inkjet printers are better than lasers at printing photos, but they're still rubbish at that too.

            It sounds like you are expecting a $50 inkjet to print lab quality photos. In other news I have it under good authority that no car on the road goes faster than 170km/h because that's the top speed of my utter shitbox, and the *only* alternative is to race in an F1 car.

            That's the kind of ignorance you're displaying.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Laser printers aren't great for photos, but it's cheaper to just use an online photo printing service or go to a local shop, than it is to buy a photo printer.

        HP ink is considerably more expensive per litre than human blood.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jsonn ( 792303 )
          amazon.de lists HP 31 ink at 140EUR/l. The German Red Cross sold the donated blood for the just about that price in 2015, ironically. Please note that I am talking about bottled ink, not the cartridge scam.

      • Want to do something useful today? Don't buy scam-enabling inkjets.

        This. Lasers are 1000000% better.

        I can't think of a single reason the average person would want an inkjet printer. Inkjets are specialty printers these days.

        Print your "photos" at the local mall print shop, it's way cheaper and better quality.

    • I'd expect more success and impact (not to mention fun and profit) from making a YouTube channel that tells people what printers to buy and which ones to avoid. People do actually watch that, and that way you're not just some nobody who already bought one of their printers and thus is already useless to them, you're someone who deprives them from more dupes falling for their crap.

      And that's something they care about, unlike you and your letter after you already handed them your money.

    • Re:Middle-management stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @05:46AM (#62768596) Homepage

      I hit an ink pad issue last year with mine.

      To be fair, it's a legitimate issue - the ink pads can only soak up so much ink. But the pads were pretty straightforward to clean out (and would be even easier to replace if Epson had designed it that way), yet there's no way a user can reset the counter. I had to bring my printer in to a repair shop to do that last step.

      The annoying thing was that this was "secret". No buyer knows about this issue before it hits them. And there's things you can do to help avoid triggering it - e.g. limiting nozzle cleanings and marginless printing. But you can't do that if you don't know the problem exists.

    • Re: Middle-management stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)

      by djp2204 ( 713741 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @06:16AM (#62768610)

      In the USA - a better thing to do is contact the FTC (or similar regulatory agency) and your state attorney general and suggest that epsons behavior might be illegal. Itâ(TM)s an election year in the USA and these officials need press releases

  • Wait till it happens with cars (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Car manufacturers are already pushing for lease/rental of vehicles over ownership. You can virtually guarantee that this will happen with car ownership at some point, but instead of ink pads it will be blamed on V2I/V2V or some other "critical" software lifecycle aspect that cars have never actually needed.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Krokus ( 88121 )

      Didn't GM already do that with their EV1 back in the late 1990s? People were only allowed to lease the car and in 2002, under the terms of the lease, they demanded the return of all of them, which they subsequently destroyed.

    • rental of vehicles = they cover all UPKEEP costs other then fuel.

      • rental of vehicles = they cover all UPKEEP costs other then fuel.

        And like rental vehicles...you will pay through every bodily orifice for the auto insurance, unless you want a STIFF bill at the end for "damages to the vehicle"

    • Dont you want to be happy because you own nothing?

    • The irony there is that I'd say it's more reasonable to happen in a car than in a printer. If the car has way to decide that it's brakes are near inoperable, or that a tire is so flat it's undriveable, then temporarily bricking the car could save lives. But if the little ink sponge in the Epson is full? No one gets hurt, maybe some ink spills. Far less reasonable to brick.

  • So first your Epson printer kills your wallet, and then it kills itself?

    This is the first piece of computing equipment to need serious psychotherapy.

    • Re:How is this legal? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by the_other_one ( 178565 ) on Saturday August 06, 2022 @11:30PM (#62768278) Homepage

      How is this legal?

      Government of the people

      By the corporations

      For the shareholders

      • It is about time that someone explained to the regulators that there is a danger of "Blood spills" if they don't put a stop to this.

        They need to be told about the French Revolution.

        Do they have education in America?

        • Do they have education in America?

          They used to, but a few decades ago they introduced "no child left behind" or some nonsense, and it's all been going downhill from that point on.

    • I don't do a hell of a lot of printing but when my printer totally flops the machines have become cheap enough to throw away and get a new one, The printing business is now worked out, not to sell printers but to sell the outrageously overpriced ink supplies where one set of cartridges costs more than the printer.

      • Why is your printer flopping? My Brother printer is now well over a decade old and works just fine.
        Don't just accept that things break as fact.

        • My printer, a Canon, no longer pulled one sheet to print but grabbed about twenty at one time.When I opened it I discovered a broken sheet separator system. Since a printer replacement cost only 59 Euros it was senseless to attempt repair.

    • Re:How is this legal? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @03:34AM (#62768462)

      It's perfectly legal for a device to be limited use ... providing it is stated as such up front. I suspect Epson very much may have opened them up to legal issues if they didn't advertise this as "capable of printing up to X pages".

  • Planned obsolescence (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Reiyuki ( 5800436 ) on Saturday August 06, 2022 @11:29PM (#62768274)
    Now lets see them explain why the scanner doesn't work when cyan is low.

    • Well, the ink might spill onto the scanner as well. Naturally, we have to shut them both down. For safety's sake, of course. Think of the children. Especially our children. Those violin lessons aren't going to pay for themselves.

      -Epson Management.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The more general problem here is using dumb counters instead of measuring the remaining lifespan of the component. That counts for ink/toner cartridges too. The printer doesn't measure the amount of ink/toner left, it just keeps a count of (in the best case) how much ink/toner was used, or (in the worst case) how many pages were printed.

      It's reasonable in some situations, e.g. my scanner counts pages to determine when the only consumable part (the paper roller thing) is likely near EOL, which probably does

  • Well known fact (Score:5, Informative)

    by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Saturday August 06, 2022 @11:35PM (#62768286) Homepage Journal

    This has been a well-known fact about Epson printers for over 2 decades.

    The inkjet carriage path has a section containing a special cloth sponge reservoir. When you "clean" the heads, it goes there and tries to spray ink into the cloth in an attempt to clean the heads.

    The system keeps track of the total ink sprayed into the reservoir, and when it deems the reservoir "full" (ie - the cloth is soaked with ink), the printer will throw an error, and the online fix is "purchase a new printer". There's no easy way for the consumer to replace the cloth pieces, and in any event it would be a messy job.

    I've had a couple of these apart. The reservoir is huge and the pads were not nearly full (over half the sponge volume was still pristine), and there's no realistic way to reset the error. It's a counter somewhere in the microcode, and without knowledge of where this counter is stored you can't reset it. (And this assumes that you have the ability to reprogram the micro *and* the security flag has not been set.)

    Search "Epson printers suck" sometime on YouTube. You can find people smashing their $4000 high-end Epson printer with a sledge hammer because they're fed up with Epson quality and service.

    • Well, if you have time to spare, hit em up in the small claims court. The excuse is an bald assumption, and assumes the user has not replaced the pad with a Frankenstein pad, or manually cleaned then with a solvent. You are having your right removed without warning or due process. Just seek a remedy to 'undo' the irrepairable and unjust harm this malicious software timebomb caused harm, plus quadruple damages. That should fix their wagon. I have serviced real estate printers with the plastic IV lines, and a

    • There's no easy way for the consumer to replace the cloth pieces

      And yet a video in TFS shows that it is very easy to replace, you can even do it with household items if the vendor is that much of a dick to not give spare parts.

      and in any event it would be a messy job.

      Oh noes, not messy! You want messy, try changing the oil of your car, something that many people around the world trivially did themselves back before cars got fancy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      Last week I took apart one that had been left at the curb. It was quite a fun surprise to get to that part and have it piss "squid ink" on me, but fortunately it's all water soluble. Unlike my mom, I don't feel an urge to put photographs on paper, so I'm quite happy with a color laser printer. The best part is they don't dry out when you print about a page a month, and toner is cheaper than ink even when half of isn't being squirted away to "clean" the mechanism.

      The most interesting part had to be the litt

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Unlike my mom, I don't feel an urge to put photographs on paper, so I'm quite happy with a color laser printer.

        You tell your mom to use a printing service which will put photos on real photo paper with real photo chemical processes and end up with a real photograph. Better yet, the cost of one of these is on the order of 5 cents. The cost for special photo paper and all that for an inkjet runs closer to a dollar per print.

        I have a black and white laser printer, and use a photo printing service at your local

  • Yep... (Score:5, Informative)

    by drew_92123 ( 213321 ) on Saturday August 06, 2022 @11:40PM (#62768290)

    ...I used service a bunch of wide format HP inkjet printers back around 2000. They had reservoirs that would hold the ink that was purged during cleaning and priming. We would have to open the printers every couple of years, clean the rubber wiper, and scrape out the reservoir. If we didn't the print heads would always be smeared with goopy partially dried ink and wouldn't print well. Never had any spill out of the printer and make a mess though... not even sure that's possible unless a cartridge were to just piss itself all at once.

    Anyway, I call bullshit on Epson, ink dries faster than the printer would ever spray it on the pad, at most it will just form a thick goopy layer on the pad that might eventually build up to the point that it touches the print head and makes it impossible to get good prints.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      I opened one up last week, the "pad" is in its own area on the bottom of the printer, fed by a little hose. It's a bunch of pads stacked up in layers to make a volume of maybe three or four cubic inches. After it had been sitting in my garage for nearly two years (it was a curb toss that I picked up to take it apart), it still had plenty of ink in that hose ready to spill on my leg.

  • This is worse on Canon printers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cochonou ( 576531 ) on Saturday August 06, 2022 @11:42PM (#62768294) Homepage
    Canon MG5500 series printers will throw error 5B00 over time, as an internal counter on the printer decides that the ink pads are saturated and need to be replaced. The printer redirects to Canon for service⦠except that Canon will not perform the service on the printers they consider too old. Here again, the operation can be performed ay home instead, and a Windows-only utility can be found on the internet to reset the printer. After this experience I wanted to switch to Epson, but this shows they are all the same.

  • Seen this issue (Score:5, Informative)

    by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Saturday August 06, 2022 @11:48PM (#62768296)

    I have seen this issue, actually.

    No, not preprogrammed printer death, but saturated ink sponges.

    In large volume printers, like HP Designjet large format jobbies, the sponge trays are a consumable that are supposed to be replaced in cadence with the print heads.

    In desktop printers, they are tucked away in a location that you have to completely dismantle the printer to get to, have no FRU number to look up for a replacement, and are what absorbs the ink when you do an 'unclog printhead' cycle. (Which desktop printers seem to need done pretty routinely).

    I have seen these get saturated, to the point they no longer function, and 'vaguely purple' black goop accumulates inside the printer's enclosure.

    You can often painlessly wash them out with distilled water, assuming you can get them loose from thier retention system. (Which is more often than not, designed in such a way as to prevent this) However, that leaves no way to tell the printer's firmware that you have addressed the issue.

    The sensible solution is to put a service hatch there, make the retention system easily worked on, and provide instructions for cleaning the pads. Add a sensor that detects pad removal to detect that service has been performed, etc.

    That would not align with the 'gillette razorblades' business model, though.

    As such, such sensible solutions are purposefully avoided by the mfg.

    You see removable trays in commercial printers for this very reason, but not in consumer models.

  • This is very old news (Score:5, Informative)

    by richy freeway ( 623503 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @12:40AM (#62768324)

    There are tools out there to reset the counter, has been for at least a decade. Google "Epson wic"

  • Won't Anyone Remember (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NicknameUnavailable ( 4134147 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @12:52AM (#62768330)
    The Epson Valdez!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      That was a black day for humanity. Or rather a dark purplish stain on humanity's thigh. Oh wait, that was last week when I took one apart!
  • I remember in my youth when Epson printers were the best available for the home and small business user. Now I would not use or recommend them to anyone.

    So sad.

    • Absolutely. My first printer was an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. It was great.

      Best wishes,
      Bob

    • I remember in my youth when Epson printers were the best available for the home and small business user.

      That was a fairly short period. I pad a Panasonic dot matrix printer attached to my Amiga because it was cheaper, faster, quieter, and had better print quality than the competing Epson... but would emulate it.

  • I read HP and Canon printers refuse to scan even when an ink cartridge is low/not working: https://www.extremetech.com/el... [extremetech.com] and https://www.mouseprint.org/202... [mouseprint.org]. Which modern printers will work then? Also, still works with USB cables without networks like LAN and Internet.

    • My Brother MFC-L8690CDW. It will show empty toners when it thinks they're empty, but it's fairly straightforward to tell it that they're full again.

      Why you'd want to plug that monster into a USB port is beyond me, but you can do it. I plugged it onto the LAN without internet access. Works great.

    • My Canon TS3300 has been in "low black ink" status for months but still scans fine, as it should be. I bought it on sale in a grocery store of all places, because it was cheaper than a stand-alone scanner. My next printer will be a Brother, though. And laser.

  • I mean very decent used laser printers from the 1990s are available for roughly the same price as new inkjet printers. Usually they even come with semi-full toner cartridges which will still last longer than a cheap inkjet printer will last. New cartridges are typically availiable at low prices.

    • Even color laser printer / scanner combinations are very affordable these days. I just wish the software in these things was a bit friendlier instead of trying to be too clever for its own good. For instance, offer a "print on whatever paper is in the damn tray" option instead of whining about the small difference between A4 and Letter, or refusing to print because the printer has "plain paper" loaded but the computer is requesting to print on "thin cardstock" for some reason.

      • The stupidest error I've seen, and I'm not sure if it's macOS, the printer and/or the driver, but I was on a Mac setup in French Canadian but the damn thing thought I was using A4 paper. All of Canada uses Letter paper, like the U.S.

        Companies: stop tying language and country to some fixed values. Let me use ISO dates, 24-hour clocks, french language, metric units and American-sized paper.

    • I have 3 instances of a workhorse laser printer (HP 4100n). Home, college office and wife's college flat. However, I also have an A3 inkjet (Canon IP850). This is for printing photographs. No laserjet I know of prints photos well.

      Best wishes,
      Bob

      • I have 3 instances of a workhorse laser printer (HP 4100n). Home, college office and wife's college flat. However, I also have an A3 inkjet (Canon IP850). This is for printing photographs. No laserjet I know of prints photos well.

        Best wishes, Bob

        Exactly. I printed Baby shower announcements and thank yous on an Epson Photo Printer. The cost of the printer + photo paper / envelopes was less than having them printed elsewhere.

    • Quality. Don't get me wrong I'm fully on board with laser printers and have one myself, but there are still very much people out there who need the quality of inkjet, or maybe even something better than that.

      • Well but inkjets are worse than laser for general documents, and if you want to print photographs there are way better alternatives.

    • I tried the used laser printer shuffle. Had a hplj2100dtn. It stopped feeding paper right so I did a roller kit. It still didn't feed paper right. So I had the choice to dig in and fix it or just buy another printer, which is what I did. Now I have a modern brother laser MFC and it's been a big improvement in every way anyhow despite barely being more expensive than a refurb'd 2100. It's quieter, it uses less power, duplex is faster... I just don't think it actually makes sense to take a chance on a used la

      • But to use a fax, you need a landline. And nobody should be using that anymore in 2022 - both the landline and the fax.

        • But to use a fax, you need a landline. And nobody should be using that anymore in 2022 - both the landline and the fax.

          I agree in general, but lots of businesses demand you use fax, so if you want to do business with them, you need to fax.

          Last time I needed to fax I got a redfax subscription. But if you do it all the time, it might make sense to use actual fax.

  • I'd expect this out of HP and am surprised to see it out of Epson. I haven't bought an Epson in many years but never will again for sure.

    • Seconded. My Brother printer does show that the toners are "empty" and that I should replace it, but a simple "nope, keep printing" is all it takes to resume operation.

      Granted, that "nope" comes in the way of a "press these buttons and hope that it registers, here's a video that shows you what supersecret handshake the printer expects from you", but it doesn't involve buying some sort of "reset" gear to dupe some mandatory obsolence chip into thinking it's new..

  • For the rare cases where a business or a government process is so behind the times that I need to print something out, I go to a place like Officeworks. That's like a dollar every few years.

    • The average person doesn't, that doesn't mean that 50% of people aren't above average. We go through several hundred pages a month, nothing to do with governments. Some jobs require it. Some professions require it. Some people work from home. Some people run their own business.

    • Not everyone lives in a megapolis/city/town with an "Officeworks" or equivalent.

  • I had an old brother inkjet that did the same. Error code, after some googling, it said the ink cushion was saturated. Opened it up. Thing was as dry as could be. If you left it on, it cleaned the ink cartridges so much that it was empty when you printed. Pulled the plug. Only powered it on when printing, which was pretty rare. Inkheads never dried out. What's wrong with a simple warning. Hey, watch out, ink may overflow. You can continue but donâ(TM)t sue us.

  • Over time, these pads become saturated with ink though generally not "before the printer is replaced for other reasons"

    "We know our printers are garbage, so we don't expect the buyer to actually use it for more than one or two prints before noticing it themselves"

    • I can reasonably fix EPSON and their quality is great. They are probably the only one left with normal ink pumps stored IN PRINTER which I can soak (with water) to clean and will last a while. The others have disposable print heads on the expensive wasteful cartridges. I can in theory print many other kinds of ink-- people have used them to print circuits for example (conductive ink.) You can get hacked ink cartridges that CA law forced them to allow (with infinite warnings that are annoying if you upgra

  • All printers have ink reservoirs where unused ink when cleaning the inkjet goes... or do you think the used ink is spilled over the inner circuits?

    All printers have porous inkpads that will saturate over time. In fact, I had to trash a perfectly printing Brother because the OFFICIAL SERVICE said it was too much to bother and that I should go back to them when the printer stopped printing.

    What happened? That the inkpads were so saturated with trash ink that when moved it spilled all over the circuits and rui

  • Disabling millions of items of personal property of others, totaling in the tens of millions.

    Lots of people are sitting in jail for far less.

    Criminal law fir us, civil law for them. Actually, not even that. It is arbitration for them.

    It is weird how companies routinely rob people of property that they own, and everyone chats about it like it is a technicality.

    You own it, they do not.

    How did people give up the rights to things they bought and paid for.

  • Don't buy inkjet printers (Score:3)

    by Arnonyrnous Covvard ( 7286638 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @04:29AM (#62768550)
    Seriously. People get suckered into buying inkjet printers again and again. They seem attractive, but they're a path of expensive misery. Don't do it. Buy a laser printer, one which doesn't prevent you from using third-party toner cartridges. Laser printers don't waste toner to "clean" themselves only to tell you they've cleaned themselves too much and can't print anymore. Inkjet printers are a scam.

    • This.

    • Oh BROTHER!
      My old laser DIED with a bogus error because Brother decided I needed to buy another one. I even had parts to fix it. only the MB replacement made it work again.

      Lasers pollute a lot; maybe the worst. Lasers are complex machines and they still charge too much; if you refill your inkjet yourself then nothing is cheaper to run. Even the old amazing WAX xerox printers!

      All printers are a scam; today they are also quite desperate to remain profitable.

    • I wholeheartedly recommend a laser printer over an inkjet printer. Sure, they're more expensive, but you save yourself from a lot of hassles.

      Secret note: Laser printers do waste some toner for every page that is printed, but it's kept sealed inside the toner cartridge, and its capacity never exceeds that of the unused toner store, so there is no chance of it overflowing.

  • The comedian Dave Gorman, on his "Modern Life is Good..ish" show, once offered an Epson printer free to the first audience member who put up their hand.

    He then outlined the cost of the ink, so the audience member who had initially wanted it then changed their mind.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Epson has LONG been on my personal “do not buy” list. I have never once used a digital imaging device from Epson that didn’t make me want to smash it. If the hardware is ok, the software is a hot mess, and vice versa. In a few cases I encountered both hardware and software were garbage.

    If you need a printer, buy a laser printer. I’ve always had good luck with HP (go for the business models) and Brother has a pretty solid reputation from other people’s experiences. If it says Ep

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