I had no idea I was buying “out-of-region” ink cartridges and I also had no idea such a thing could possibly matter. I called HP and the tech support person had the gall to tell me they have different ink for different regions because the climates are different. I nearly swallowed my teeth at the stupidity of such a claim.
They offered nothing until I started telling my story on Twitter, and suddenly a Support person messaged me on Twitter offering free replacements. So not only do they have an indefensible strategy of region-locking ink cartridges, they also train you to whine as loudly as possible to get any sort of recourse.
The entire printer industry appears to be running one scam or another.
Turns out it’s not Ink Jet, it’s HP. Lessons learned.
The printer worked flawlessly until I went through my first toner cartridges (the carts shipped with the printer are intentionally smaller so you have to replace them)
I noticed the 3rd party replacements were $80 for a full set whereas 1st party were $200. I got the 3rd party. It’s been such a headache ever since. The MAJORITY of prints from my iMac fail. Google suggests the Mac drivers have a bug that cause OOM errors on the printer. Funny thing is it always succeeds from Windows or Linux. So I half bought it, and just put up with it.
Fast forward a few years (a week or two ago) and my wife points out that there was an HP update and the printer works perfectly! Yay! The color cartridge is basically empty and needs replacing. Worked perfectly for a week until the printer popped up an error message “non-hp chip”.
All speculation and anecdotal, but I just can’t help but feel like they’ve ended their charade and are actually being “honest” with me now…
My next printer is going to be Brother; that seems to be the only honest printer manufacturer out there.
HP's software is also incredibly slow. I think it asks a server for something when I open it, which is unnecessary.
Is there some brand you can buy where this doesn't happen? Happy to pay up.
I heard good things about Brother, and 2022 will be the year that we get a Brother laser printer. I refuse to buy one single more ink from HP.
Right now, my favorite printer is an Epson.
The point is, ink extortion seems to thrive on pricing tiers for different markets, just like content extortion does.
A lot of the keys sold on various sites come from those regions, some companies iirc Ubisoft started implementing region locks.
Region locks on DVDs other than due to issues of distribution rights especially for dubbing and subtitles followed the same logic especially in Russia where region locked DVDs were released much earlier and for much cheaper as piracy was far more common there than in the west.
And a dire warning about where the book may be sold.
Turned out that the starter cartridges that came with it were US region coded and the printer was now permanently locked to US ink.
Hated that thing with a passion - the crunch it made hitting the bottom of the e-waste bin when it finally broke was deeply satisfying.
I’ll never purchase an HP product ever again.
Some retailers care that the products they're selling are conning people; especially if it results in returns.
Can you explain why it is a stupid claim?
High humidity is known to affect things such as ink drying time which can affect print quality, so it isn't immediately obvious to me that it would be stupid to have different ink formulations for different climates.
Edit: note that I'm not saying that HP was telling the truth. I just wanted to know how the very idea that of different inks for different climates is apparently stupid.
Yes, in most places the humidity varies a good amount. But there are regions where it tends to be high most of the time, and regions where it tends to be low most of the time. It doesn't seem inherently absurd that an ink company might have say low, high, and regular humidity ink formulations designed for areas that are persistently low, persistently high, or neither.
You might expect this to be pointless because humidity often swings a fair amount each day, but that the way humidity affects printing is by changing the moisture of the paper. A place where humidity swings from low to high and back on something like a daily cycle is likely to have much smaller swings in paper moisture content. The paper will remain closer to the some sort of weighted average of past humidity.
It is clearly a bald faced lie, coming from the least trustworthy source. If they told me water was wet, I'd double-check.
It's for price localization - sell at what the market will bear, and different regions have different price points.
Sure, but I would assume that the US is a single region for the printer cartridge DRM's purposes, but you can easily find both areas of rather high and rather low humidity in the US.
I don't think the parent you're replying to is saying that the idea that things perform differently in different climates is a stupid claim, but that it's essentially impossible that's the reason why HP region-locks their cartridges, and claiming such is indeed stupid. (Or just flat out rude and disrespectful of the support person.)
There is only one US region cartridge and the US includes Alaska and Florida, or the high plains and Florida. The difference in humidity in these regions is massive. I would need different ink in the summer and winter in my upper Midwest state.
It doesn’t pass the smell test. Humidity probably does affect printing on some level, but that is irrelevant to the HP support person’s claim about why cartridges are region locked. They’re lying about why the region locks exist, this isn’t hard to understand.
During 2020 there was a shortage in my country of inks, no local suppliers - official or unofficial - had any. He found some on eBay from another EU country, but when they arrived the printer wouldn't accept them. Apparently the inks are region locked, and the only way around it would be replacing the main board of the printer to change it to the other region.
The previous hp printer refused to accept new ink. The significant other threw out the empty cartridge needed to bring the cursed thing back to its senses. It hilariously still prints out the test page flawlessly with the new ink.
It does help to complain there, I've done it to for effect too. It's the only reason I still have a Twitter account :)
How is this not ripe for disruption?
Honestly, I haven't bothered owning a printer, but if I had to -- I would probably try my luck at a laserprinter.
OEM refill bottles cost around 120 USD per liter when bought from office supply stores in small 70 ml bottles. Large non-OEM 1L bottles with quality ink manufactured in Germany cost 30 USD.
I have never heard of Wilhelm Research, but this pdf has a comparison of fade times, and the EcoTank is listed around ~2 years under glass, at least dark storage rating is >100 years for all of them
Edit; oops, forgot the link: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/hp/WIR_Ink_Tank_Printer_Comp...
I'm still not buying HP but they do have these.
Printing photos well at home could have more demand than ever now that almost everyone carries a camera around with them all the time but that camera doesn't produce prints you can frame and put on the wall the way you used to.
good luck getting VC funding when your business model doesn't involve some sort of recurring revenue.
For everything else, yeah, laser printer.
Documents? Reach for the lasers.
It’s called a Brother laser printer
(I'm assuming any moderately successful open source firmware-only effort would motivate manufacturers to start using some kind of "trust management" garbage in future models.)
I'm sure the community has enough intellectual ability to create, if not a full printer, at least replacement firmware for existing ones. There just doesn't seem to be much motivation to do so.
I will never buy another Canon printer again and think twice about any of their other products. At least they're giving HP a run for seeing which firm can burn their brand the fastest.
And genuine ink cartridges are expensive! The practice of locking to prevent using generic cartridges is terrible.
Inkjets are a scam, plain and simple.
So, I bought an inexpensive Brother laser printer. It's black only, but I switched to printing most photos at Costco years ago anyway - the quality is just so much better than you can achieve at home. Anyway, what a revelation! It starts up in a couple of seconds, and when you hit "print", it just does it, again in just a couple of seconds. No moaning about maintenance. No asking me to change a cartridge every 3 minutes - just a printer that works when you need it to!
And it came with a "small" ink tank, that is somehow still going! Even when I do need to buy another ink tank, a full sized one, it'll only cost something like £30 and probably last for at least 5 years!
Definitely a fucked up world we're living in. I feel bad for those less tech-savvy. Worst still for our planet though as I suspect that rather than lining HP or Canon's pockets, the less sophisticated users are simply tossing out these peripherals faster than an old VHS player.
Thankfully there are many cheap online photo printing services with rapid turnaround where I live. I just use those instead, and accept that getting a photo printed isn't instant.
The chip is just an EEPROM. The printer presumably has a pretty accurate estimate given that it knows how many pixels were printed, and the volume of each one.
Because of the chip shortage, Canon is selling cartridges without chips that identify them as genuine, so Canon is telling customers how to override the warnings that indicate they are counterfeit cartridges.
I was able to get a replacement printer from the place where we were staying, but this situation still enrages me to this day. What if this had been a real emergency?
I hope you diffused the information and that this printer brand is now known and banned in every emergency service as unsuitable.
It's way too dangerous, but I often pondered a "zero ink" solution that burns text directly onto paper. Essentially a high-speed laser engraver. I could imagine given heat and fuel, you would want to limit oxygen, possibly by pulling a vacuum.
I would also like to see what a modern take on a dot matrix printer could be like.
They are still being made, but not cheap.
Would you believe that this is apparently a big ask? The latest Canon did not work on OSX. Something like >12 months after an OS update they couldn't push out a functional driver. HP I can't recall what the issue was but it was sent back for a refund and this was accepted. Perhaps also lack of OSX support. Finally, our Brother printer worked with the following not insignificant caveats: replacing the toner apparently requires surgery on the prior cartridge to transfer a chip, calling Brother they don't give a shit, scanning cannot be done directly to PDF it must be done to JPG then converted over the PDF or you get garbage pages instead of correct content, and you cannot have both ethernet and wifi active at the same time on a printer purchased explicitly for this purpose in 2021.
Honestly, the printer industry is so bad there's actually room for a new entrant to do it properly.
There's also low hanging fruit like detect if multi-page scans have been inserted the wrong way up, etc. which the idiotic industry has failed to latch on to despite 20 years of opportunity. Also, office label printing. Input to traditional label printers is crap. Try inputting non-roman character sets or engineering symbols on those things. Ugh. A decent driver ("print from excel", "[x] sever tape after label") and embedding this within a standard office printer would surely yield large volume tape purchases.
Basically, people don't know how much it actually costs to make a printer and don't know enough about it (not a judgement, they probably have better things to do than spend hours researching printers) to choose based on overall quality and such metrics. They basically just choose based on price.
So manufacturers competed on price until they got to well below the all-in cost of the printer (including R&D, etc) hoping to make it up in the cost of consumables. So now they HAVE to make whatever money they are going to make on the consumables side.
If a company came out with a printer that was expensive enough that they could make money on the printer and not on consumables. How many would they sell? My guess is very, very few, as consumers would just buy the cheaper-up-front option.
Note that this mostly applies to ink-jet and not laser, as the latter have historically been purchased more by businesses which are more likely to know about and focus on overall quality and economics, and take consumable cost over years into account during purchase. I guess now that laser printers are entering the consumer market more and more, and consumers are still they same as they have been, we're going to see this issue pushed into lasers as well (as noted in this tweet).
Currently very few people I know actually print anything with digital services and email. They use tablets for reading documents. For a covid pass you can show the PDF. For a train ticket you can show the QR code on the phone. Some employment contracts can be signed digitally, maybe this you print?
I'm not sure what you need printing for.
Some of these people buy a printer for a one off because they will never finish the cartridge over time.
The only uses I can think of are public notices like lost cat or printing a handwriting exercise. I have had to print out rental contracts to sign but real estate will eventually modernise.
[0]: (German) https://www.canon.de/support/business-product-support/interi...
Apparently only Canon Service providers can do a full factory reset due to "data protection" reasons.
Go figure.
(There are plenty of Chinese, Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Vietnamese forums discussing consumer electronics repair, but very few in English.)
