It’s a well-known secret that inkjet ink is being kept at artificially high prices, which is why many opt to forego ‘genuine’ manufacturer cartridges and get third-party ones instead. Many of these third-party ones are so-called re-manufactured ones, where a third-party refills an empty OEM cartridge. This is increasingly being done due to digital rights management (DRM) reasons, with tracking chips added to each cartridge. These chip prohibit e.g. the manual refilling of empty cartridges with a syringe, but with the right tweak or attack can be bypassed, with [Jay Summet] showing off an interesting HP cartridge DRM bypass using a physical man-in-the-middle-attack.
This bypass takes the form of a flex PCB with contacts on both sides which align with those on the cartridge and those of the printer. What looks like a single IC in a QFN package is located on the cartridge side, with space for it created inside an apparently milled indentation in the cartridge’s plastic. This allows is to fit flush between the cartridge and HP inkjet printer, intercepting traffic and presumably telling the printer some sweet lies so that you can go on with that print job rather than dash out to the store to get some more overpriced Genuine HP-approved cartridges.
Not that HP isn’t aware or not ticked off about this, mind. Recently they threatened to brick HP printers that use third-party cartridges if detected, amidst vague handwaving about ‘hackers’ and ‘viruses’ and ‘protecting the users’ with their Dynamic Security DRM system. As the many lawsuits regarding this DRM system trickle their way through the legal system, it might be worth it to keep a monochrome laser printer standing by just in case the (HP) inkjet throws another vague error when all you want is to just print a text document.
Dont use inkjets, its a drain of your wallet.
And if you save on your printouts the cartridges dry out an you still have to pay more.
Unless you are printing photos regularly, laser seems like the place to be.
Looking back a bunch of carts died hardly being used in previous printers of mine but my inkjet drum sits idle for over a year and works fine when I next need it.
Agree! I have a monochrome laser printer, when I need to print color, it’s CVS or Staples printer I use. Let them buy the color toner.
Color laser toner isn’t that expensive
Even better, most color laser printers can be told to print black and white / grayscale by default and then only switched to color mode when you want it.
Its $300+ x 4 colors for my hp 5500dn color laser…..
I too head to Staples when I need to print. I just use my HP printer for the scanner. I have not bought a cartridge in over four years.
I suspected they did something to my printer when I bought OEM cartridges for a perfectly good printer that stopped working after.
Sign up to hp instant ink and don’t buy another cartridge ever again. Post the empty one back for free and be sure you have a 100% ethical closed loop, zero landfill process.
the key is NOT to allow your printer to firmware update. turn off the auto-update (I have an HP and i did this and constantly use after-market cartridges).
is that a wide format printer that it lasted a year without using it? cuz I have an HP 210 and I definitely have to run it every few weeks otherwise the cartridges will clog. I think the next one I get is going to be one of the epsons or a Kodak because I talked to reps and I said can I put any ink in it, kept pushing with follow up q’s and eventually she said “Sir you can put peanut butter in it, All I’m saying is that we’ve only tested our ink so if you break it then that would become your issue”
and i said thank you maam.
I think @inkjetmorelikeinkworst used “inkjet drum” while meaning “laser printer drum.” Inkjets don’t have drums.
Make sure you do your homework about non Kodak ink because I tried 3 different brands and they wouldn’t work. I bought my first Canon inkjet and I absolutely love it. I use off brand ink all the time and it never clogs after a couple months of sitting idle .
lol they lied to you. you have to use their ink brand. and you can’t stop the firmware from auto-updating which it will do after the first few print jobs with a 3rd party cartridge. but funny thing is when you got back to a canon/epson cartridge your printer STILL will not work until you send it in to have it reset (back to not allowing 3rd party cartridges). it cost $350 to have it reset.
Just be sure to get a laser printer that does not require a monthly subscription to use.
We have used color lasers for the past two decades as a photography business. You might ask why we would use lasers to print photos? We don’t, that would be terrible. We send photos to be printed a lab because who wants to spend more printing them yourself, dealing with the crappy hardware yourself, and getting the same or worse quality?! It’s cheaper getting them done at a pro lab and if someone spills their beer on their wedding photos they wash it off and get another beer (unlike the ink jet print that would now be ruined).
I hate ink jets. I worked at HP for years and we all hated them. 😆
Same here. Worked at HP and told them around mid-2000s that cheap color laser was going the be the next wave and they shoud get on-board. I was told it would never happen. Also was told that nobody would ever want a laptop with more resolution than WUXGA and (and by Samsung that a 40″ LCD TV would never be less that $1000 USD).
Seems big companies never listen to their employees…
BTW I have two laser Canon printers. Both allow generic toners. They notifiy you when you change the cartridge, then never again.
It´s a drain of ink at first. Every time you power your inkjet, it just wastes the ink with its vacuum pump.
I would say in the lifetime of an inkjet printer about 70% of the ink ends up in the collecting pad inside it.
Some printers are junked because the pad is so saturated it causes streaks but a simple cleaning brings back functionality
I used to be a Canon technician at a dealership. The color laser printers used to have a chip in the drum carts that had a digital odometer in it. After x prints, the machine would shut down demanding a new drum… many times only after a few hundred prints. I found out that our eeprom burner could reprogram the chips. Soooo… I grabbed a new drum, read out the data, reinstalled… and ran it…. reset it at eol, and ran it again.. reset at eol.. we got about 2.5 x the drum life as what it was supposed to do before image quality started to get affected. Planned obsolescence for more profit.
Wow 2.5 is a lot. Waste of resources. Any link or websites how to do this? I have a xerox with same issue
I hate that shit!
I see no reason it would shut down “only after a few hundred prints”.
The drum does wear due to the abrasive nature of contacting the paper 1,000s of times.
(paper <- trees <- forest <- soil <- sand ). And the printer doesn’t have control over the lousy paper you buy.
So the drum “odometer” was Canon’s way of judging this. Say, after 3,000 images, the drum wear is starting to affect the quality of the print output.
Usually when you have a toner cartridge refilled, they reset the “odometer” chip, but they certainly don’t replace the drum. So fresh toner, but aged drum. Marginal prints. (In many cases would be fine if you are printing invoices in a warehouse. Maybe not so good if it’s color business graphics, and lousy if images.)
The paper shouldn’t cause the drum to wear. The whole process is an indirect photo-electrostatic phenomenon that creates charges of opposite polarity in the toner vs. the paper. Just getting the paper and drum close enough without touching causes the toner to transfer to the paper. Pretty cool stuff! There’s a rubber or silicone cleaning blade, kind of like a squeegee, that does contact the drum, though.
I’ve had a Samsung ml1710 for more than 35 years which I still use daily. I’m on my fifth cartridge. My new HP just crapped out necessitating sawing a hole in it to access a failed drive gear, and using automotive belt dressing on the deteriorating rubber paper pickups. That in the relentless messages about the knockoff print cartridges I’m using. Won’t be buying an HP again anytime soon.
Totally agree! Just stay away from those HP (Huge Profit) printers! 😱
“and using automotive belt dressing on the deteriorating rubber paper pickups.”
That’s a hack that I wish I had known a number of years ago!
Most of the belt dressings have a strong resemblance to Permatex #2 non-hardening gasket dope.
Might be a bit aggressive~sticky with paper feed though.
I’ve used the Permatex a few times when V-belts were slipping a bit on vent fans. If the belt is riding the bottom of the pully, it’s done.
Belt dope Is only a short term thing to get you through until you can change a belt and often the pulley sides are worn (cupped) also and ready to change also. Rusty pulleys will eat belts too.
I’ve got one still in service too!👍
I’m still refilling my first OEM cart…
Had to make a circular tip for an old soldering iron to make a hole for emptying the fused toner bin, but that’s easily patched with a piece of painters tape.
The planned obsolescence and forced wastage in the printer industry is darn near criminal.
It’s certainly unethical AF!
I had an ML1510 for aeons and gave it away, still working well, about five years ago when I got given a massive Dell 3130CN colour laser. I’ve replaced the black in it three years ago, and it’s only just gone down one bar; the three colour carts are all nearly empty, but because the beast is well and truly obsolete I got replacements off eBay for £5 each! Inkjets are a joke, and if I want the odd few photos printing I’ll pay someone.
The Epson ecotank seems like one of the few exceptions to this, particularly if you’re not printing a lot and want color.
but at what cost? seen them at Costco, but high price point to play
You pay for the printer, you pay for the ink or you pay for the hacks, pick one.
At least it’s a fair price.
my epson inkpad failed before I used up one set of refill inks.
with the inkpad fail it will not even let me use the scanner function.
wish me luck with my new brothers brand laser printer.
Right on. I’ve been using an Amazon-bought Brother laser printer. Absolutely love it. bought some backup toner carts for it and have only had to swap once in a couple of years. Laser printers are where it’s at. I use Walmart photo lab for my color prints. It’s the way to go.
So far, Brother seems to be the only brand not doing nasty things with DRM. I only buy Brother laser printers, and recommend them to anyone willing to listen. I stay away from all ink jet printers like the overpriced scams they are.
I only buy brother because I use Linux and I know they work on Linux. I have a mono laser and inkjet mfc, just got aftermarket ink cartridges, it told me I was using non-oem ink and then let me print just fine! Output was perfect.
You can change the maintenance box. I’ve had an eco tank for 6 years, changed the box twice. Prints fine. $9.99 for the box from Epson.
Change your paper setting to satin and you’ll use less ink
Partially true. It depends also on how much you print, how much the ink will cost and how long the printer can stay without printing.
I use to print on photo paper from time to time, so I need a ink printer and my several years old WP4515 can easily withstand more than two weeks without a single print, in some rare cases (like when I have been away for nearly two months) needing only a few passes to clean heads completely, and I use non original XL cartridges I buy like once or twice per year at a local physical shop for like 4 Euros each. When I don’t have anything to print I just pick among the family photos and print one on photo paper with pretty good results. The secret in fact is to never print all photos at once, but keep some of them ready for that moment in which you have to print something but don’t want to waste ink and/or paper for a useless print or a head clean.
Sadly, newer Workforce models don’t seem to be solid and durable as my old one, unless one spends a lot more.
I mean inkjet printers are just better for certain things. sure day-to-day office use it’s not necessary and it just doesn’t really matter cuz you just need to get words on a page or a graph or something.
They needn’t be. A continuous ink system, or even just refilling your cartridges manually, can actually make them quite cheap to run. Thing is, you obviously have to get a model that won’t make your life difficult – so steer well clear from HP, who are the absolute worst of an already bad bunch.
Sold mine to a baseball bat last month. Heard it didn’t go so well with the new owners either.
I personally use a Brother inkjet printer. My current one is just over a year old and on about 20,000 prints the previous one lasted 5 years before the yellow started playing up. I pay the equivalent of about $20 for a liter of each black, cyan, magenta and yellow which lasts at least a year or more. Great printers
What is your opinion on “ink tank” inkjet printers? They seem to solve the expensive ink issue. An official bottle of ink is much cheaper than a cartridge, and there’s nothing stopping you from using third party ink which is even cheaper. And they last much longer too. However, I never used them so I don’t know the caveats
Now and then, I wonder if we’ll ever see an open source firmware for printers.
Unlikely due to the number of printer brands and models, but I’d still like to see it. I mean, what is the technical or otherwise reasonable justification for locking out the scanning function of an MFP when the toner is empty or malfunctioning?
I used to work for Phoenix Technologies, who makes printer firmware. Companies such as Canon would come out with a new printer and ask us to port our software to their new hardware. Essentially, any printer that’s not branded Apple or HP has some of my software in it.
The software for rendering printer pages is wildly complex. The PT version was, IIRC, 300,000 lines of C code, and frankly it was the absolute best C code I’ve ever seen. Clearly documented, well laid out, completely functional.
Despite this there were always problems, minor issues that had to be fixed. Usually in the form of “this particular command with this other command in this orientation is misaligned” or some such. A separate company sold a set of HPGL/PCL/Postscript reference sheets that went through every variation of every printer command code to be used as a reference for printer makers… and the entire set filled a couple of shelves entirely and cost something like $100,000 and the company periodically had to go through each sheet in the reference set and compare it to the corresponding printed sheet from their printer software to look for differences.
The QA department at PT was completely top notch.
To give you an example, the very first Lexmark printer used our software. We got a complete hardware reference and some test rigs, we ported our software, and our first release resulted in over 900 bugs.
I don’t think there will ever be open source printer firmware, because the effort to make correct printer firmware is simply enormous. So enormous that I don’t really see it done to any great extent by volunteer labor. (And note that most of the open source labor is focused on development and not, for example QA.)
I also don’t see a lot of value in doing so, although I could be convinced otherwise.
this is the most insightful reply i read in a while. thank you!
Amazing what one learns when they see how the sausage is made.
Agree!
Great post, but open source software can display PDF files sufficiently well. Couldn’t that raster for the screen be repurposed for the drum without too much trouble? It might require a bigger CPU, but Raspberry Pi Pico for $4 can handle it.
This.
In 2024, you shouldn’t be writing 300,000 lines of monolithic C code for anything, except perhaps an OS kernel if you hate Rust.
I can live with a few pixels of misalignment while printing, if some unpaid opensource library dev just couldn’t be bothered to fix his rust/python/javascript/whatever document rendering.
Which might even run inside the printer if you put a decent ARM processor in it.
I’m using a Raspberry Pi Zero running Linux as a simple print server at home. It’s several times more powerful than Pico and yet it could take several minutes from clicking Print on my PC to printer actually starting to spin. I had to configure a pass-through mode in CUPS and let my desktop PC to render printouts to make it usable.
It’s possible that the filters are wildly inefficient. It’s possible that CUPS is doing something silly. But I wouldn’t bet on Pi Pico being able to render 100-page PDFs using existing open source software. At least not with some heavy effort.
Agreed that the Pico is in an entirely different class, but a pi 4/5 with just enough RAM is not unreasonable to dedicate as a print server and will be a major upgrade over the Zero. Or to be put inside the printer to do the same work.
Tremendous comment. Thank you
A rare glimpse behind the curtain that we don’t normally get to see. Thanks!
I think you just made the case for creating alternatives.
Because what you describe is feature-rich and unwieldy legacy firmware written in C for ancient microprocessors. Still useful for a cost-optimized printer, but not necessary anymore.
These days the same job can be done with a scripting language if you want, just put a decent ARM processor in the printer. Or a raspberry pi outside it, and send the bitmap to the printer, with the printer doing no rendering. Something analogous to Klipper.
As for the value, it is about owning your devices and reducing e-waste. You don’t own your device if the manufacturer keeps root access or seeks to prevent you from getting around the restrictions they put in for ink cartridges. A printer is e-waste if the manufacturer doesn’t provide a driver when you upgrade or migrate to another operating system or you feel that the particular cartridge system is a rip off. Opensource firmware/hardware will fix that.
Prove it. No one else has. Which means it’s not worth the time. And honestly people talk about e-waste all the time and still totally e-waste all the time because it’s way more convenient, and we as a species tend towards convenience over everything else.
So prove it and make it easy.
There is nothing to prove, because such a thing has already existed. Only problem being its proprietary nature. Look up “GDI Printer”. All rendering was done on a computer and the finished bitmap was sent to the printer which contained simple code to run the CNC mechanism that translates the bitmap to paper. No more 300,000 lines of C code for processing PostScript.
And now that cheap ARM processors exceed the processing power of the Windows PC’s from that era, you can also add an (integrated) print server that does the rendering.
900 bugs in the code, 900 bugs in the code
Take one ticket fix it all good
901 bugs in the code
Love it!!!
Thanks for sharing your experience. Yes, making a FOSS firmware for printers would be next to a nightmare that the developers community cold never sustain, however there could be a middle ground solution, say take one well known model that satisfies most users needs and work on that one only. Sort of what GrapheneOS does by running almost exclusively on Google Pixel phones to offer the best Google-Free (the irony!) mobile experience.
GrapheneOS isn’t google free. It just prevent Google Play Service to run with full privileges. It still requires you to give access to almost all your hierarchy, grandma and 3rd generation included. If you want to use Android Auto, for one, you’d need to use Google Play Store so the whole GrapheneOS’s sandboxing concept collapse in that case.
Which processor instruction sets are used?
In the early 90s I worked at Microsoft and we were developing a software based printer that used the canon engines. It was doomed because the OS wasn’t even close to the task of feeding image data through the drum as the paper fed. We spent two years, and an insane amount of overtime paying contract QA to basically feed tens of thousands of test pages through the drums. Usually with timing issues where whole region’s of the print would be blank. The entire reference print was indeed a filing cabinet worth of paper… And we would have to go through it all, page at a time, to find the bugs with alignment, character spacing, orientation, fonts, etc etc etc. The intent was tobe able to sell a Microsoft printer for dirt cheap, and we could “patch” with updated cartridges.
Like I said, doomed from the start. I have zero idea how the protect even ever got green lit. Windows was NEVER going to be able to be real-time enough to work.
Name of the MS group or program? This doesnt sound plausible. Even a 2 bit HW engineer would build a buffer in the printer to reliably eliminate any problems (like buffers in CD-writers). Its not a rocket surgery – Atari was delivering software defined SLM605/SLM804 Laser printers in 1987 severely underbidding 1985 Apple LaserWriter.
Wow this is an incredible comment worthy of a HaD article in itself, thanks!
I do wonder if, starting from scratch and with an eye on a simpler overall process with limited or no support for older / quirkier protocols/setups etc. a much streamlined and open-source printing system could be arrived at for the 99% of people who want to churn out a sheet of A4 every so often.
We seem to be at a point where the average 3D printer is now a better user experience than the average 2D printer – we can use anyone’s filament and nozzles etc., we can generate G-code in any slicer and (as long as the parameters are right) the printer will understand it and print, and certainly within the consumer/hobby end there’s no DRM or other nonsense.
I have an old Samsung laser printer that falls into what I believe was called the Winprinter category. To make the printer cheaper, it only accepted bitmaps. The whole page was processed first, then sent to the printer (a nibble at a time?) over a parallel cable, using a simple compression scheme.
That meant it wasn’t possible to make the printer work by sending it ASCII, let alone postscript. It was kind of a scandal at the time; buy a printer and it would only work with Windows and the associated driver. Fortunately, an open source programmer made an adequate driver for Linux (the Brasilian Rildo Pragana, if I recall correctly.)
The same sort of bitmap printer could be done again.
This reminds me why we have the OSI network stack model. Without such efforts, communication would be locked in proprietary silos. Essentially, open source built the internet; a machine that renders multimedia information seamlessly across vastly different physical platforms. If rendering a graven image is a difficult software task, it seems likely to me that it is someone’s best interest to keep that difficulty alive. Heck, there are plenty of machines that render physical artifacts in three dimensions that are driven by entirely open source drivers!
So it’s a PITM attack?
I’m sure there have mod-chips / console mods that could use that term as well.
He called it an MITM attack. Please leave your woke sensitivities at home….. save them for men, or women, who care!
I understood that to mean PcbITM attack.
(No, I really didn’t)
Never, ever, ever buy HP printers!
Then you will never have to worry about having to MITM your own ink cartridges…
If somebody gives you one, destroy it for parts!
Brother printers FTW…
Agreed. I recently had to buy a new black cartridge for my Brother color laser and I went with one from Brother because the difference in price compared with off-brand stuff is small enough that I don’t mind.
They also have a recycling program so you just print a label and send them the spent toner for free. I don’t need to dispose of it and hopefully they recycle enough that the environment benefits as well.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. Brother printers are awesome.
Unfortunately, the Brother toner recycling program has been suspended. I tried to drop off a toner box with the Brother-supplied mailing label just this week and the post office said they don’t accept those anymore. The Brother website says the program ended September 5th and that they’re working on getting it back. We’ll see if that happens.
In the meantime, you can always just refill your cartridges yourself. There’s nothing in the cartridges to keep you from doing that other than a little bit of disassembly/reassembly to gain access to the refill plug and resetting the new-toner indicator.
I had a T45i(?) that was a workhorse; lasted about a decade IIRC; used expired carts from eBay for about half my ownership of the unit. When carts got priced more than used unit, switched to laser.
Oh my goodness! If only I’d known this five years ago, when I bought my HP Instant Ink printer, then shared my instant ink friend code online and so far have free ink up to August 2048 (not a typo)… think of all the money I wouldn’t have saved!
“it might be worth it to keep a monochrome laser printer standing by”
It might be worth it not having a HP printer.
My HP Laserjet 5 is the epitome of reliability and quality. From back when HP printers were desireable.
Once they started to make 4000% profit on their ongoing printer supplies is when their actual printers went downhill.
HP LaserJet 5 rocks, power off leave off for 5 years, power on and it just works, no messing about.
Back in the day I deployed four HP 4s.
3 years on, when the most used printer hit 1,000,000 pages and needed a drum rebuild, we swapped it for the back corner unit that had only printed 300,000 pages.
5 years and the only problems we had were a handful of paper jams.
Those were TANKS
I still miss my HP Deskjet. No version number, it was the first, later updated as the HP Deskjet 500. Ot had font cartridges. It served our family well for over 16 years but in 2005 I threw it out. Worst decision ever in printer department.
Maybe – but what are you paying for ink???
Is Laserjet 5 supported on Windows10/11. I have Laserjet 4 but it stopped working with Windows7 as drivers are not available!!
Is it feasible for you to keep an older PC setup with the HP 4? Would networked be acceptable
I’ve hung onto some older machines just because of legacy items/softwares that still have desired features or simply work too well to just trash.
Off lease corporate laser printers for the win. Old toner is cheap and plentiful on eBay, the ink doesn’t dry out and the printers are typically repairable unlike consumer inkjets.
Another vote here. Off lease corporate gear will do you right. Also, repair and parts for these are very available and reasonably priced. Plenty of old (non-DRM) HP refurbs still available.
I have a bunch of old Dell laptops that will run forever and were dirt cheap. Stick with Latitude and Precision and leave the Inspirons for the recycle guy.
My humble home server is an off lease HP (ironically) EliteDesk 800 G2. For $120 a few years ago, it runs all my virtual stuff extremely well. Absolutely recommend it over a Pi as it’s several times faster. You can even play most indie Steam games on it with no problem.
Well as someone who needs their office laser repaired it’s not that cheap compared to the cost of a new one. Printers are almost commodities and the price reflects that.
I just bought an HP C1025 color laser from circa 2011 so I can make color transfers on transparency film to do 3d prints. The toner carts are $80 for all 4 on Ebay. Crazy reliable and affordable.
How are you using printed transparencies to make 3D prints?
Maybe it’s a shrinky-dink?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinky_Dinks
The real shame is that this hack is necessary at all, I guess HP stands for Huge Pr…edatory company.
I’ve decided that Laser is the way to go. I have a older B/W Brother Laser and now a color Brother Laser. Both work very well. They never need ‘unclogging’ . Just work and have a RJ45 ethernet port which I really like (rather use than Wifi). Since they are on my local network, they never see the internet.
I also have a Brother Inkjet Tank printer. Like said above we just don’t use it enoughWe have to ‘unclog’ the jets every time wasting paper. It is the last inkjet I’ll own. Only redeeming feature is it has a scanner built in to it.
I started with HP inkjet printers a long time back, but I had bad experience with them (even when others loved ’em) . I then went to Epson and had fairly good experience there while kids were in school. Then I run onto Brother printers and never looked back. I bought the B/W Laser really for making own PCBs … but that never happened. However I really enjoyed the reliability of the Laser. So that is why I ended up buying a Brother color laser.
I’ll never, ever, buy a printer that ‘requires’ internet access to use. Just another bad idea by bean counters.
Neat hack BTW!
I will stick with my old Brother printers that don’t have any electronics in the toner cartridges.
Laser give a much better print quality for text and I hardly ever need to print photos.
Brother laser printer last forever. The ones at work are 10+ years old still working fine.
But, the wifi is trash on them, even the newer printers. Random disconnects, turn it off on on type issues, to whoops I’m just going to take the IP of your DHCP server and take down your network. The new ones just forget your network credentials after a month. On Ethernet they are great.
Our Epson ecotank 3850 doesn’t get much use, it is still on the initial inks. But, if I want to print from my Linux PC over Ethernet, I have to power cycle the printer. If my wife wants to print over WiFi, I have to change the printer settings and reboot it.
And it doesn’t scan to thumb drive or send faxes.
Faxes? Like they had in the 80’s and 90’s? The ones where you could “email” a letter over a phone line? I’m 39 and I’ve heard of this technology from YouTube video’s but never seen it in real life. Is there still a use case for for that or is it just for fun, like using floppy’s?
“Never ever…” is a rather strong statement knowing that imported cartridges and liquid ink are of questionable origins. Hackaday readers are usually more thoughtful in their opinions.
I think a sane analysis of the ecosystem is in order. HP sold the inexpensive color inkjets with a price tag based on making a huge profit on replacement ink cartridges. The old razor and razor-blades concept. Unknown how discounted the printers were, but I cannot imagine that they made anywhere close to retail.
The OEM replacement cartridge is pricy compared to re-manufactured units, but one does get a new thermal head and fresh ink with known chemistry.
Buy a new HP ink-tank printer and HP recovers the profit on the front end and replacement OEM ink is reasonably priced. I’m very pleased with my Smart Tank 6000 but I waited for a decent sale before purchase. I can buy real HP ink or compatible ink from various manufacturers. Personally, I intend on HP because the ink is reasonable in my opinion, but the printer is nearly 9 months old and the HP utility is showing minimal ink used and the printer is used constantly by my wife … Sadly, it is not the ink cost these days but the paper cost that concerns me.
In my lab, I have a HP Laserjet for source code and other utility mono-print functions; it is over 15 years old and still going strong. A real beast of a workhorse. A Brother multi-function machine sits in my office the past 20 years and is used mostly with Linux documentation and just keeps working as needed.
I got the first iPhone when it came out, but I was not an AT&T customer. Somewhere along the line I purchased a little flex PCB with an impossibly small microcontroller on it. You put it in the sim tray and it fed data to the phone telling it it was an AT&T sim card during the startup process. It was an effective hack, and honestly I don’t think Apple cared a bit. I eventually switched over to a software hack because it was more reliable, but I recall feeling quite smug when I inserted that overlay.
They definitely do because many years later those PCBs are still made and every once in a while Apple would release updates to block them.
The HP color lasers have the same DRM issues and the same absurd price issues. My printer came “open” but the first code update put the kybosh on after market toner. Luckily, it’s possible to reverse updates and turn them off. All part of the “right to repair” issue.
When I need to print, I grab a USB stick and head to the local library. At 10c per B&W page (Australian) I’m printing less than $40 per year.
Hard to justify buying any printer, at that rate.
How local is the library?
Are you taking into consideration the expense of getting there and back?
Never mind, I’m just being facetious!
B^)
And what price a slab of life going to and from the library?
A slab of life spent at the library is never wasted!
I’ve had two B&W laser printers in 25+ years, still have the second one, works fine. This DRM is a pathetic cash grab by all the inkjet manufacturers. Just my 0.02.
Nice find and explanation. I have an old b&w hp laserjet without any DRM nonsense. Refill cartridges a few times, before the waste toner compartment is full. When needed, new HP toner is about $20 per cartridge, delivered. If color is required, I have a variety of commercial locations for printing.
I have an Epson Eco Tank ink jet printer and it has large tanks that you pour the ink into. Have had it 7 years and use it most every day in my small business. One of the first things I’ve always done with any permanent ink-head ink jet printer is to setup a way to have my computer print out a full page color graphic that has all the primary colors and black in it. I usually use Windows Task Scheduler to set this up. I’ve found that once every 3 days seems to work too keep the nozzles of the print head getting clogged with dried ink in the case that it is sitting unused. The ink savings in rarely having to clean the nozzles more than makes up for the print outs. Also because you aren’t running cleaning cycles the internal sponge lasts much longer. Have only spent about $80 over 7 years refilling it 3x. But most people wont spend $600 on an ink jet printer so BS like DRM ink cartridges make up for selling printers for 2% margins. The buying habits of consumers often drive what seem to be draconian anti consumer actions of companies. If they can’t make money off the hardware because consumers have un- realistic expectations of what a very complex and labor intensive assembly of the intricate gears and belts of a printer entails they will make up for the R&D and manufacturing costs through ink.
These unrealistic expectations are set by the manufacturers themselves. They all want to have the cheapest unit on the shelf. Most people just want a printer for occasional printing and quality isn’t that important so they go for the cheapest thing they can find. It’s a commodity. So manufacturers moved to the razor and blade model of selling cheap printers with expensive ink, allowing them to minimize the shelf price and win their customers on that.
That was fine for a while, but those printers could still print a lifetime’s worth of prints for most occasional use, so then designs started changing to make them run out faster. Ink would dry up quickly if not used regularly. Cleaning cycles would run incessantly, burning lots of ink. Cartridge heads were kept open to collect dust with no good way to clean them. Various forms of usage counters were added to force printing to stop long before the ink was used up. All in the name of ensuring print quality, of course.
Maybe some of these issues were a limitation of the technology, but I remember when home inkjet printers were first introduced and they didn’t fail as quickly as modern ones seem to. There was no hardware DRM forcing things to be replaced early and often and preventing competition in the market.
You can blame consumers for preferring things that are cheap, but remember that consumers can only buy what manufacturers produce. The manufacturers have chosen to go down the road of having the lowest shelf price while gouging on ink prices because that maximizes their bottom line, and so long as those are the only options to consumers from every manufacturer, all that we get to choose is which brand we want to screw us.
Hear, hear!!!
My point was, there is a choice, but that choice costs considerably more because the profit is from the hardware not the ink. If you run a company and have fixed costs that require “x” amount of profit to support your fixed costs you need to make the money somewhere. Consumers have a choice in color ink jets. They have consistently expressed that they would rather pay the profits on the ink side. I worked for 2 decades in the supply chain for a now deceased but huge computer retailer back in the 90’s. At that time most printers were sold at a loss to the manufacturer and the retailers often sold at less than 6% gross margin. The retailers relied on making their margin off the printer cable not the printer. Kodak didn’t realize this and at one point released a printer with bright yellow boxes with bright blue print that shouted “Cable Included!”. The retailers refused to sell them because there was no way to make a profit from them. They all got shipped back to Kodak. Kodak removed the cables, put a sticker over the “Cable Included!” and shipped them back out. My point is sometimes consumers push manufacturers into a corner. Manufacturers won’t stay in business making reliable printers that net them $2 and that consumer turns to 3rd party in refills. That’s just the reality. But Epson has tried to break that model with their EcoTank line of printers. You can buy one of those if you don’t like DRM ink practices. Or you can complain about DRM ink cartridges.
I had to replace my HP Color LaserJet 3600 some years back, and the “new” printer has turned out to be utterly useless. They did a firmware update the other year that removed the ability to disable sleep mode, which wouldn’t be that big a deal, except that once it goes to sleep it’s impossible to print to it over the network. The only way I’ve found to wake it up is to power cycle it. Poking at the fancy menus on the LCD doesn’t seem to do anything.
I’ve avoided HP InkJets for years, and between my current problems and the fact that my mother’s laptop can’t print more than one document before her HP LaserJet has to be restarted (yet Dad has zero problems), I wont be going the HP route again.
Printers may be cursed, but theirs seem to be more-cursed.
The lawsuits need to be handled like drunk driving lawsuits.
Go after the stores selling HP products. Be that Printer or the ink or power cords, etc.
And go after any Computer company that bundles HP software with any products.
Make it a deep pocket lottery just like was done to gun companies.
Get another “social” media campaign started about banks that handle financial transactions for HP.
Hewlett Packard needs a dose of “cancel culture” Along with John Deere.
Why monochrome laser? Old colour lasers are cheap and plentiful and you can get toner for them on e.g. Aliexpress really chip and, since the toner doesn’t really ever go bad, the printers can sit unused for a decade and print like out-of-the-box new. I would know, I got three old colour lasers from some old construction company’s office, where they had been sitting for a decade and all that was required was cleaning all the dust and spider webs off and replacing the drums on them, since they were all worn out.
Colour lasers are, IMHO, great. They print fast, they print clean and while you can’t get photo quality out of them, they print plenty good for anything aside from photos.
It’s been years since I stopped using HP. Never again. They can take their ink and shove it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s their product, they can do whatever they want with it, but it’s my money, and I’ll spend it on good products. Good for me, not for them. By some weird coincidence, those are made by HPs competition (Brother). So, as far as I’m concerned, HP doesn’t even exist. My life is better and has been better ever since I stopped using them.
This unethical behaviour is not uniques to HP [1]. Practically all laser manufacturers lock toners to regional lockout nowadays. E.g. Xerox comes with region free toners. These have limited capacity. The printer will lock the region to the first set of replacement cartridges. If you move from Central Europe to Western Europe, or vice versa, you won’t we able to buy working toners in a local shop. 3rd party toners are similarly out of business. Of course, there is no way to read out the region code from the printer or the toner. Some devices will enter an error mode if a toner with incorrect region code is installed. You need to call service and they need physical access to the printer to fix.
Printer manufacturers are f..king crime organisations, anyone being in management there for the last 15 years should go to jail.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_lockout#Printers
I bought a used laser color xerox phaser 67xx a few years ago just for this reason. Of course I had to hack the firmware if i ever wanted to service the thing myself since xerox is as closed as apple, but at least i dont have to worry about this nonsense anymore.
I have bought an HP laser printer and I am quite satisfied. Admittedly, that was almost thirty years ago (it is LaserJet 4000 produced in 1998), but it is still working very well. And given that you can easily buy original cartridges for it, I am not the only one…
The solution is simple. Stop buying HP printers. I switched to Linux friendly Brother over a decade ago and have have looked back.
Gillette marketing. Give ’em the razor (printer), sell ’em the blades (cartridges).
This should be illegal. Not just for the ethical side of it, but for all the environmental waste it creates.
A bit surprised the EU hasn’t done it already.
Why should it be illegal? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like it, but it’s a business model because of the consumers. People want a 60 euro printer so HP makes a 200 euro printer and makes money by selling you the cartridges. If they put a 200 euro printer in the store instead of the 60 euro one, then people won’t buy it. Just because it blocks 3rd party cartridges, which I really dislike, it’s not generating more environmental waste.
Friends don’t let friends buy HP printers
Bricking a half-full ink cartridge just because it has hit xx number of pages, simply to sell more cartridges, seems criminal. Am I the only one thinking that a class action lawsuit is in order? I know CALs are all the rage these days but this seems an example of a good use case.
I litereally
I literally do not understand how the head office people think pissing off customers makes good business sense. I was using 3rd party ink without complaint in my Officejet pro 6978 for a couple years and woke up one morning to find the printer was demanding HP cartridges. Silly me for allowing automatic firmware updates. Fortunately, I found earlier firmware online and did a rollback – and disabled automatic updates. What a pain and I’m never going to buy any HP product again.
I have a Samsung multifunction laser for over 10 years. I have had very few problems with it and service was impeccable.
Then HP took over service and supplies. They won’t even answer a question without a billing account, let alone perform a service that costs more than a new printer.
And I use a 3rd party cart that is 1/ 2 the price and provides a third more prints. No DRM.
I would happily discard my ancient HP DeskJet 610 if only my laser could print out really black lines on OHP transparency films in order do make PCBs at home. No laser printer I tested dit not produced such a pitch black lines like even the oldest and cheapest inkjet can.
Are you using the transparencies for UV blocking the PCBs before etching?
HP’s oil based inks are the key to this. Most ink jets use water based inks that aren’t nearly as opaque.
I’m using a Raspberry Pi Zero running Linux as a simple print server at home. It’s several times more powerful than Pico and yet it could take several minutes from clicking Print on my PC to printer actually starting to spin. I had to configure a pass-through mode in CUPS and let my desktop PC to render printouts to make it usable.
It’s possible that the filters are wildly inefficient. It’s possible that CUPS is doing something silly. But I wouldn’t bet on Pi Pico being able to render 100-page PDFs using existing open source software. At least not with some heavy effort.
That should have been a reply to Rick Dean’s comment above. Oh, WordPress.
It would be time for the EU to make laws that make clear that when you buy a product, you can do with it whatever you damn want, buy cheap ink cartridges or not.
If manufacturers don’t want that, they should clearly label what they sell as a “service”.
Let the lawyers run your company and you can join Boeing, Lotus and Gateway in the history books.
I don’t know about Gateway, never heard of it, but with all it’s faults and massive scandals, Boeing is still operating. Lotus is still making cars and still in operation. Although they don’t make anything interesting anymore. The days of the Elise, Exige and Evora are long gone, sadly. They now make boring stuff. Like most car companies nowadays. I still see an Evora every day. Exiges are the coolest cars, but I need to cut the roof off to fit inside. Then I still can’t drive it as my legs don’t fit. But boy does it look epic.
Have several laserjet boat anchor printers, a 4050 and a 5000 that I found at a thrift store for dirt cheap! Both still chug, the 5000 occasionally will need a new pickup roller, or major cleaning, but still keeps going. Same with my 1220c, which was also a both of a workhorse. Did finally have to take out the ‘service tray’ and do the Windex Soak, but it’s back in and off it goes. No DRM, no chips, and if some nozzles clog and I can’t clear it (also doing the ‘Windex soak’, refilled cartridges are cheap and plentiful… Plus easily refillable. Hee…
We switched all our printers from ink jet to the Epson eco tank. It has saved us thousands each year. We haven’t had to even refill the printers and it’s been a year. Normally we would have filled the others at this point. The refills are dirt cheap and the printer comes with a refill
Yes. You understood the expense of the EcoTank as compared to the other brands, would be more than made up for in the cheap ink refills. I would encourage you if you don’t frequently print colorful images to set up a system where it prints an image with all the primary colors and some black every 3 days to prevent clogging of the permanent print head built into these. The ink this uses is way less than a cleaning cycle and also unlike a cleaning cycle doesn’t shorten the life of the ink sponges used by the cleaning cycle. I use Windows Task Scheduler to this automatically for me and my 2017 EcoTank 4500 still going strong and less than $80 spent on ink in 7 years.
HP’s greed has screwed themselves over. Subscriptions on consumables will drive away your existing customers before you can blink. No need to brick my printer. I’ll just use the off button and unplug the power. If I need the scanner / copier I’ll power it back up.
Epson Banks on their stupidity to acquire new customers. And to think HP were leaders way-back-when they came out with the LaserJet 4! High volume toner cartridges, great quality.
I just use HP subscription ink and never have to be concerned about finding nor running out of ink. Had it for about 5myears now and it’s great!
I pay $8 a month and I get all the ink i need free and a printer with a warranty.
I have a Canon printer that takes individual color and black cartridges. I buy off brand cartridges and have for years. I have never had an issues with them or my printer. I have never bought a HP printer and I never will. I also won’t ever buy a printer that has a all in one color cartridge either. Having individual cartridges for assures you deplete the entire cartridge and not just one color within it.
Since when did printer cartridges become more expensive than buying a new printer. I purchase a new printer every time my cartridges run out. I’m not joking; I’ve been doing this for about six years. I don’t buy expensive printers—just cheap Canon or Epson, and sometimes HP. In fact, for the past 2-3 years, I’ve been using a Canon all-in-one. This year, I have already bought 11 printers, and I typically purchase 15-17 printers annually.
Most people say I am spending more, but that is not true. The problem with poorly made third-party refill cartridges is well-known. Manufacturers are happy, I’m happy, and the problem with cartridges is sorted out. However, the environment is not happy. But seriously, do they really care about the environment?
In that time I have owned 1 Epson EcoTank ET-4500 Workforce All-in-One printer/scanner/fax machine. The enormous ink tanks cost less than $50 to fill (all colors and black). When I purchased it in 2017 it came with the first refills in the box which I didn’t need to use until over 2 yrs of use. It wasn’t until year 4 of ownership that I had to purchase refills which, at that time were $29 for a complete set. Just this year I had to purchase for the second time a complete set and the price has risen to $45. The print counter registers some 18,000 pages printed. People worried about warranties could just go to 3rd party warranty company or get an extended one from Epson and still financially be ahead of the game. It is odd that you can blame the printer manufacturers for you being OK with tossing 11 printers a year into the landfill when there are less expensive and far more environmentally friendly options available. I’m just tired of people in this thread saying their are ” no other options”. There are. They just cost more upfront, but more than pay for themselves over time.
So it seems I’m the only one using the cheapest HP ink jet printer and paying the extortion .. I mean, the price of catridges.
Last week my printer obviously got some updates and refused to work with a replacement catridge with the chip that is mentioned in the article. It does work – when you take the catridge out, unplug it from the wall, plug it back, turn it on, and put catridge back on, it takes around 20 seconds for firmware to recognize it as unsupported. So I put all of my printing in the pool, and do this, and it prints and complains after it finishes printing.
Will buy a new original catridge next, I need a printer at home to print around 20 pages a month., half of it in color. Paying 40 euro per year is OK for me.
I use hp printers with 3 months free instant ink, taken 2 printers back so far. So I spent £58 on the last printer, I’m on £11.99 a month ink and 9 months free ink. £49 ahead at the moment. I’ve also got three boxs of instant ink delivered sitting on the shelf. (These are the ones they send out when you put your set-up cartridges in).
What’s keeping someone from using a similar design to 3d print their own printer, using those cartridges?
Should research before I post.
https://hackaday.com/2020/06/13/no-need-for-speed-with-this-arduino-based-inkjet-printer/
DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT USE HEWLETT PACKARD INSTANT INK. This is a massive rip off. We subscribed after buying a HP Printer (which by the way we will never ever do again, we’ve had Brother and Epsom before and this one is by far the least user friendly). After a few months, clocking up approximately £80 we realised we hadn’t been sent any ink and hadn’t finished the original ink that came with the printer. I removed the cartridges and could tell that they both had over half of their ink still remaining. We promptly cancelled our subscription. Shortly after the E0 error code appeared on our now disabled printer – “unsuitable ink cartridges fitted” or words to that effect. Realising what had happened I went straight on Amazon and bout 2 new genuine HP cartridges for £22. The printer resumed normal business. The two original cartridges, still over half full, rendered useless had to be disposed of. I say again, DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO HEWLETT PACKARDS INSTANT INK SCAM….YES…SCAM!