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Comment by dgl | Hacker News Reader

Sadly only applies to these high end ones; I got a cheap Epson one and found out after moving it to another country, that the cartridges are indeed vendor+region locked.

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EcoTank printers don't use cartridges. You fill the ink tanks with ink bottles. They've come down in price, you can buy an EcoTank printer for ~$229. A couple of other companies have followed Epson in offering these kinds of printers. Sadly Brothers' version requires a proprietary cartridge tank.

Region locked ink?! That's a special kind of stupid.

They do it for the same reason as anything else: to charge different prices in different parts of the world and still stymie the gray market.

Importing ink from another part of the world isn't gray market, it's a perfectly legitimate option that the vendor happens to not like.

Its the definition of gray market: "the trade of a commodity through distribution channels that are not authorized by the original manufacturer"

I looked it up and you are 100% correct. I now object to the existence of the term, as it clearly attempts to imply that legitimate activity is close to black market activity, but this is the correct use of the term as it exists. (Thank you for correcting me; it is far better to object to the right thing.)

Amusing story.

Sun used to sell different (large) CRT monitors to northern hemisphere vs southern hemisphere.

Apparently the magnetic field was reversed and the CRT guns would be pre-aligned for the correct part of the world.

(insert northern vs southern hemisphere toilet joke)

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