Your printer is expired

Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 2:44 | Posted in computer | 2 Comments
Tags: epson, hp, printer

Sven is pissed off  because his HP CP1700PS printer was blocked. There was nothing wrong with the printer but the black ink cartridge was expired. Apparently, HP does not allow you to print after the expiration date of a cartridge although there still is ink left in the cartridge. Sven’s mood did not get any better when he replaced the cartridge just to detect that the printer would still not do any printing because now the yellow ink cartridge had expired. As icing on the cake, HP’s support site refused to swallow Sven’s letter of complaint.

Maybe it was a small comfort for Sven to detect that Epson users have it even worse. Epson seems to have a “waste counter” that paralyzes the printer after a specific number of prints allthough there is nothing wrong with the printer. Epson just made sure that you would buy a new printer soon enough even if your old printer works fine. Luckily though, there is a downloadable script in the web for adjusting the counter to zero.

I am lucky enough not to have this problem. I have an ancient HP LaserJet 4 printer which dates back to last century. At that time the manufacturers had not as yet gotten the idea of promoting their product circulation with this kind of unethical means. My printer is a regular pile of junk but I only need to print about 10 pages a year. When it eventually collapses due to old age, I am not going to buy another printer. I’ll just print my odd pages in the local library and pay 20 cents a page for the pleasure, which adds up to the grand total of 2 € a year.