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Printer HP The Courts

Canon Is Getting Away With Printers That Won't Scan Sans Ink (theverge.com) 72

Posted by BeauHD from the womp-womp dept.
Last year, Queens resident David Leacraft filed a lawsuit against Canon claiming that his Canon Pixma All-in-One printer won't scan documents unless it has ink. According to The Verge's Sean Hollister, it has quietly ended in a private settlement rather than becoming a big class-action. From the report: I just checked, and a judge already dismissed David Leacraft's lawsuit in November, without (PDF) Canon ever being forced to show what happens when you try to scan without a full ink cartridge. (Numerous Canon customer support reps wrote that it simply doesn't work.) Here's the good news: HP, an even larger and more shameless manufacturer of printers, is still possibly facing down a class-action suit for the same practice.

As Reuters reports, a judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit by Gary Freund and Wayne McMath that alleges many HP printers won't scan or fax documents when their ink cartridges report that they've run low. Among other things, HP tried to suggest that Freund couldn't rely on the word of one of HP's own customer support reps as evidence that HP knew about the limitation. But a judge decided it was at least enough to be worth exploring in court. "Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that HP had a duty to disclose and had knowledge of the alleged defect," wrote Judge Beth Labson Freeman, in the order denying almost all of HP's current attempts to dismiss the suit.

Interestingly, neither Canon nor HP spent any time trying to argue their printers do scan when they're low on ink in the lawsuit responses I've read. Perhaps they can't deny it? Epson, meanwhile, has an entire FAQ dedicated to reassuring customers that it hasn't pulled that trick since 2008. (Don't worry, Epson has other forms of printer enshittification.) HP does seem to be covering its rear in one way. The company's original description on Amazon for the Envy 6455e claimed that you could scan things "whenever". But when I went back now to check the same product page, it now reads differently: HP no longer claims this printer can scan "whenever" you want it to. Now, we wait to see whether the case can clear the bars needed to potentially become a big class-action trial, or whether it similarly settles like Canon, or any number of other outcomes.
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Canon Is Getting Away With Printers That Won't Scan Sans Ink More

Canon Is Getting Away With Printers That Won't Scan Sans Ink

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  • My FAX machine won't send FAXes without ink, either.

    It's incongruous.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aloniv ( 1972020 )

      When I last sent a fax years ago I recall a report being printed after it was sent (e.g. 10 pages sent to number 123456789 at 9 A.M. successfully) so that might be the reason the fax machine refuses to send a fax without ink.

      • As I recall, in that scenario, it sent the fax, then kept the report and incoming faxes in memory until paper or ink was present. Of course, that might have varied with manufacturer. Nowadays, they have display screens, so they have a way to communicate with the user in the absence of paper and ink. I can relate to your rosy optimism, but this all smells like deliberate "enshittification" because it is not just an isolated report.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kriston ( 7886 )

          Nope, it just refuses to send the fax when there is no ink.
          I even disabled the report feature.

          Not sure what you mean by "rosy optimism." I'm reporting the undisputable fact that my fax machine won't send without having ink.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kriston ( 7886 )

        I disabled the report feature. It still refuses to send any faxes.

        I receive faxes using an online service so I have no use for the printer.

        I have moved to using my scanner to send faxes, which is stupid but it works.

    • Wow, there is someone else on earth to send a fax to?

      • Japanese government still use fax

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kackle ( 910159 )
        It's still common in doctors' offices (why not?), even if they've replaced the physical machines with computerized faxing. I understand lawyers also use it. Frankly, I'd trust that relatively local data transfer over an encrypted, over-the-Internet transfer where there are an infinite number of prying eyes and where the encryption of the data that the hackers have saved will be broken in the future.
        • It's a HIPPA thing. (Sorry, this is a 100% USian-centric comment).
          Faxes are specifically called out an an acceptable and authorized medium for sending health records via an electronic means, so it's been easier to just keep a fax around versus spending the $ to upgrade to a HIPPA-compliant EHR system.
          • My point still stands: A fax sent in my podunk town will never been seen by Russian hackers unless they are physically here tapping into the local phone lines.

            Any Internet data that is captured (which can be done remotely via hacks/common malware--see the various ransomware attacks in the news) WILL be decryptable in the future (it's not debatable), even if done so by brute force methods.

            So I'd argue faxes are more secure.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        Medicaid in the U.S. State of Indiana still uses fax for proof of income. Beneficiaries must either fax documents from home or bring them to the office.

  • It's really sad about HP (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Friday August 11, 2023 @09:33PM (#63761160)

    HP, an even larger and more shameless manufacturer of printers

    I remember a time when a discerning customer would prefer a HP printer for repairability, availability of cheap toner and quality. Yes you'd pay more for your printer, but after that you'd be guaranteed to have a printer that works forever and won't nickel-and-dime you.

    Just like I remember Apple computers being an open platform.

    Just like I remember Samsung being a byword for quality products and not shitty spying smart TVs.

    I guess it goes to show just because a company is great at some point doesn't mean it's guaranteed to stay great.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 )

      What was it someone said here recently?

      Phase 1, be great to customers
      Phase 2, be great for business partners, fuck over customers
      Phase 3, fuck over everyone then die shortly after

      Something like that.

      • CEO of a (decent) company I worked for said: "Look after your customers, and look after your employees, and the share price will look after itself. "

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Alwin Henseler ( 640539 )

          Few exceptions aside, decent companies aren't in the hands of shareholders. Period.

          A family business / other privately owned, or democratic government backed enterprise, or non-profit... possibly decent.

          Run-of-the-mill public corporation (esp. big multinational)... unlikely.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          A rare sort of CEO and company these days! Most companies see customers as sources of recurring revue to be milked, and employees are seen as liabilities, costs to be minimized, rather than assets to be protected.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wwphx ( 225607 )
        I haven't trusted HP for three decades. In the '90s I worked for a law enforcement agency in IT. We sent our techs to HP to get certified to repair scanners and inkjets. Then HP decided they weren't selling parts kits.

        I would consider their lasers, except all the crap they're doing with DRM for their inkjets I think is likely to creep. Right now I have a Samsung B&W laser (pre-HP buyout) that suits my needs quite fine. Cost about $100, finally replaced the starter toner after having bought it so

    • Back in 2014, we bought an HP 1102W B&W laser printer. The toner lasted until 2020, at which point I bought another toner cartridge. It's been three years and it's reporting 80-90% full still.

      We don't print very often, but I've never had any issues at all with that laser printer. So I, at least, would probably buy from HP again if the need arose.

      • I agree. I bought the same printer about the same time. I can print from anywhere in the house using its WiFi connection and the toner cartridges last for years.

        I've bought and recycled two inkjet printers during that time and will never buy an inkjet again. If I absolutely need a color print, there are many locations where I can print a single color page for less than a dollar.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by wwphx ( 225607 )
          This is what I recommend to everyone. Unless you have a very serious need to print color, get an inexpensive B&W laser and do your color printing at work or at a print shop and print your photos via Walgreens or whatever.
      • ^^^ This, 100%
        I have an HP AIO laser printer/scanner.
        I bought it in 2018.
        I have replaced one toner cartridge since then, and IIRC, it was an aftermarket one that cost like $30 and is supposedly good for 3000 pages. I print maybe 20 pages a year, so I figure I'm good until I die.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Samsung SSDs are pretty good and Samsung HDDs were before. As to HP, yes, their laser printers were good, but have you ever called support? When I did 25 years ago, they explained to me that no, since the printer was connected to a UNIX print server, they would not provide support. They would only provide Windows support. All I wanted was the command to turn duplex on or off and this was an expensive "professional" laser printer. Decided then and there never to buy any printer from HP.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Hmm, engineers had to sneak expandability into early Apple products, because Steve Jobs opposed it. He was into computers being disposable appliances even back then.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _merlin ( 160982 )

        That isn't a fair characterisation. Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs believed internal slots were a barrier to adoption [folklore.org] because they were intimidating, scared off non-technical people, etc. Burrell Smith tried to sneak a local bus slot in as a "diagnostic port", but he was shut down.

        I think they did kind of have a point, particularly with Apple II and S100 slots, where you needed to mess with mounting connectors on the back panel and running cables to them. Standard form factor cards with backplates like ISA, N

  • I'm not buying anything Canon anymore, ever (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Friday August 11, 2023 @09:54PM (#63761194)

    Bought a Canon inkjet printer three weeks ago, because my old one had some problems with the head, there are no ink cartridges for it anymore, and I needed an urgent and very quick job on a large (A4/letter-size) transparency with photo quality on a Friday afternoon.

    Imagine my joy, when on the first try to print, I got "Error". As you know, it is "Read the RTFM after all else fails", so after 30 minutes of debugging connections, driver settings, printing test prints with "low quality" on "regular paper" ok, and failing on large size photo, it started to dawn on me that the problem is not an "Error", but a purposeful limitation of the printer features.

    Lo and behold, the manual states, that this printer only prints photo quality to size up to the ridiculous Japanese post card size, and if you want to print A4, you're out of luck.

    Not by "technology" but by purposeful limitation, which is hidden somewhere in the 50th page of the manual, just because they can.

    Luckily, my other printer decided it will work with third-party link. It is an old enough model so it doesn't have the ink chip reader "feature".

    But no more drivers, so I need a virtual machine with an old Windows copy just for it...

    Fuck you, Canon, and fuck off.

    • Bought an inkjet printer three weeks ago

      Why?

      It's been obvious for at least 20 years that that's a bad idea.

    • It is an old enough model so it doesn't have the ink chip reader "feature".

      I don't think "old" matters anymore unless it's truly ancient. I have a Canon PIXMA iP5200, can't remember how old is it but I have ink order from 2006 when I was already using a device to reflash the chips from the ink (you needed to transplant the chip from the empty to the new/third party ink, flash it and it worked fine). I actually used so much that flashing device that I soldered 2xAA batteries to it as it had a CR2032 and it w

  • I can see how these lawsuits might not accomplish much. (Especially if they hinge on vague promises in advertising like "You can scan whenever.")

    (I mean, if THAT was such a strong legal argument, we'd already have put an end to companies promising "unlimited data" plans, right?)

    I've really cut back on how much printing I do though, and while I do a lot of scanning in an attempt to shred and toss the piles of paperwork that tend to collect up here? I bought a dedicated ScanSnap scanner for the task. So my HP

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      I still have the original Epson Stylus Color (approaching 30 years old) and since they've stopped making the ink cartridges long ago (and no third party company has stepped up to make the cartridges) I've been buying 25-year old new-old stock cartridges on eBay to keep printing. The cartridges are now $5 each, shipped, and they still work! Wow.

  • Brother printer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Saturday August 12, 2023 @12:28AM (#63761374)
    I got a cheap Brother Laser printer. You can buy a box with five third party toner cartridges, two black and three coloured, because everyone uses more black ink.

    It shows a warning when it thinks a cartridge is low, but it will go on printing with whatever toner is left. When the prints donâ(TM)t look right you swap a cartridge and reset the counter for that cartridge to make the warning disappear, but it prints just fine with the warning.

    No complaints at all.

    • Yep. Laser is 100% the way to go.

      You still want photos in 2023? Use the booth at the mall.

      You're not printing photos? You'd have to be a drooling retard to use an inkjet.

      Of course everybody here will claim they still print photos all day long even with tablets and when everything is online. In that case man up and buy a proper photo printer.

      • I had an inkjet years ago. I didnâ(TM)t print enough, so every time I tried to print, the ink was dried up and you had to flush it somehow to unclog it which cost as much ink as printing 50 pages. Ninety percent of the ink went on that. Laser printer-it just prints.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by aloniv ( 1972020 )

          I still use an inkjet printer and no longer suffer from dried ink as I run a cron job that prints a test page twice a week (the printer also has a removable printhead so dried ink shouldn't be a problem regardless).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by kackle ( 910159 )
            Exactly. I still use the first one I bought almost 30 years ago, but I print a test page once a week. (Another tip that I've used in my work: You can use pipe cleaners dipped in alcohol to "floss" the print heads in some tougher cases.)

            • Exactly. I print a test page once a week.

              Get a laser, they Just Print.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by kackle ( 910159 )
                New laser printer = $. Keep 30 year-old, working printer = already paid for, no spying, no micro-printing, no firmware games, no extra time required to purchase laser and install, no larger desk space required, less power-use, less expensive "ink" (the cartridges are $5) and no extra e-waste for a planet that's already burning.
      • I print certificates on 200gsm card that's preprinted with a background and headers and logos and stuff, I found that laser printers cause the card to bow from the heat, I had an old HP inkjet that I used until it stopped working recently so I bought a cannon tank printer that's has a straight feed and it prints perfectly for that one job I use it for, the tank idea and concept so far seems amazing, the old cartridges for the HP were really expensive and had I think 900 pages at 5% coverage per cartridge, a

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by guruevi ( 827432 )

          I have a Canon MF642Cdw that prints without a problem to (laser-specific) 200gsm card stock. You do have to get the laser paper and make sure it's not stored where it is too moist. It's not the 'cheapest' printer, but it does photo quality stuff on (laser optimized) photo, card stock, envelopes etc.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jsonn ( 792303 )
          I'm using an Epson Ecotank to print certificates on 220gsm paper if I have the time. If it is a bigger event, I use the inkjet to preprint the background and logos etc and a laser to add the names. Ironically, the inkejt is actually cheaper than the laser for most cases.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        I have decent Canon laser and it prints photo quality just fine. There is laser photo paper. Even pro studios are using this for pre-prints before they go to the (expensive) resin or pigment ink.

    • Yup... my wife's brother laser failed. She got a new one. Repaired the old one. Fuser role was delaminated. Probably because she yanked paper out too hard after a jam. That was 5 years ago. Thing still works great now.

    • But aren't. Love my Brothers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caveat ( 26803 )

      Amen to that. I bought a $100 Brother laser a while back, it's only B&W but the only things I ever need to print at home are B&W and that's once every six months (mostly tickets/boarding passes/return labels); I actually got it because my cheap little Epson all-in-one kept drying out from lack of use. If I need to scan, I have a very high-end flatbed scanner on the desk next to the printer, and if I need a color print it's going to be a photo so I'm gonna be paying a print shop anyway.

      People are stu

  • I had one of those (Score:3)

    by doragasu ( 2717547 ) on Saturday August 12, 2023 @02:41AM (#63761542)

    It was an excellent machine, but I moved to color laser printing so I only used the machine for scanning. Eventually the ink died and the machine refused to scan unless you used a convoluted trick involving several printer reboots using different button combinations and a sheet of paper feeded in a specific way.

    Ended throwing away the machine and buying a scanner. Will never buy a Canon (or HP) printer again.

  • Game over! Nikon won!
  • Generally, avoid buying them. In addition to removing dependency, the sinlge-function ones usually do more and they do it better; it is also easier to assess them prior to purchase. Just saying.

  • Don't buy Inkjet printers! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Saturday August 12, 2023 @04:35AM (#63761670)

    Please, people should have learned by now that inkjet printers are expensive and don't work very well. Plus the business model around them is to sell you expensive ink. We now have very good used laser printers on the market, often for much less than $100 unrefurbished or starting at around $100 for refurbished ones.

    An HP Laserjet from 1992 will likely still work perfectly after you perform some simple maintenance on it, and it will still work after you update your operating system, as drivers are included in virtually every operating system from Amiga Workbench to Zenix.

    Inkjet printers kinda are the SUVs of the printing business, they are expensive, bad for the environment and the justification of buying them is based on some ultra rare occasions like having to print a photograph.

    • Inkjet printers kinda are the SUVs of the printing business, they are expensive, bad for the environment and the justification of buying them is based on some ultra rare occasions like having to print a photograph.

      Yea, I have an accent Canon Laser Multifunction that has been a workhorse for many years.

      Inkjets can be useful in specific instances. I did buy an Epson Photo printer because the refurb was cheaper than getting some baby shower invitations printed and I could run a proof, make changes, and print them all off faster and cheaper than ordering them. When we needed more, I just loaded some paper and printed them. I've used it for a number since and now it'll just sit on a stand until and if I need to print

    • Your information is fitting for most but not all printers and use cases. If you want to print colour photos, laser is no where. Aside that, some ink jets are cheap for printing, cheaper than laser.

      I consider my Epson ET-8550 prints as good as or better than anything from any print shop that I've tried, and it prints up to A3+ for the same price per area as smaller format, instead of the ridiculous exponential increase that print shops charge. Also, it has a very low cost per print and takes bottles of ink

  • I have not had a printer since around 2006. I have discovered that I don't need one. I print something about once a year, by taking a thumb drive to the UPS store. Most of the time I print to PDF and save that.
  • How else would it print the errors during scanning?
  • I have a VERY pedestrian HP 1020 laser printer. The cartridges are cheap and plentiful. I bought one for everyone in the family when they came out. No more inkjets anywhere!. Drivers are available but the smarty-pants at Apple don't include them anymore. They are still around: https://support.apple.com/kb/D... [apple.com] HP drivers for Windows are pathetic. 2012. And you know good and well the HP printer isn't so complicated that they can't just keep it going. ...now I just go to Office Depot and use their printer..
  • It would seem a private settlement wouldn't preclude a future class action.
  • I am a proud owner of a Canon printer (Pixma MG3620) and had no such problems. However, I am grateful for the warning. My next printer will be Brother or Epson. This is the right way to inform people. Free market is a good tool against corporations who want to rob their customers.
  • My faience bought a Canon Pixma All in one years ago. We dont really print and its cheaper to print off documents at the local Pack n Ship than buying new ink, so the unit sat in the closet when it ran out of ink Recently we needed to scan some documents related to our wedding, and I was shocked to discover that there was no way to scan while the printer was out of ink. I tried everything from button combinations that should reset the unit but would not. Device shows up in Windows, so I tried sever scanning
  • Probably close to a decade ago, it might have been a Canon, I don't remember. It was definitely not HP or Epson. I went out and bought a flat bed Epson scanner and a laser printer and will never be an inkjet owner again. And I rail against inkjets whenever someone asks for a recommendation. The personal use cases for owning one are pretty much zero, so much cheaper owning a laser and sending your color print jobs to a shop or doing them at work.

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