Some Epson printers are programmed to stop working after a certain amount of use
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a class action lawsuit for that.
Is there a list somewhere of printers that are neither user-hostile nor designed to scam customers out of their hard-earned money?
And turning it completely off is also not an option, because then if feels the need to super clean itself which wastes the ink all at once...
I bought a b&w duplex laser printer and use it with non-genuine toners. If you enjoy reading from paper its a good investment imho.
A quick search gets prior discussion https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=drm%20free%20printers
If money fell from the sky in abundance and could be exchanged for new printers there would be no problems with these shenanigans. Assuming that money is scarce and money spent on a printer means something else will have to remain on the back burner does change things.
To emphasize and focus the reader's attention on a particular property of money the writer would like to highlight. Money has many properties, and emphasizing the relevant one helps the writer to communicate their meaning more clearly. It also helps to express the writer's frustration at the printer manufacturer's behavior. In that way, it serves much the same purpose as the irrelevant adverb "sadly" you added to your parenthetical aside.
fair point.
> Money has many properties
Hmm. Never thought of this. Can you provide a link discussing these? I have no idea, economics is not my background and this sounds relevant.
Specifically the properties sub-category
The only complaint I have is that after a large number of pages the printer will insist that the toner cartridge needs to be replaced and will just stop printing, even if the printer output darkness is still acceptable. Quite annoying if you need to print urgently! Fortunately I found a youtube video with a work-around you can enter into the UI on the printer.
If you need a printer for documents, get something that runs on powder toner, like a color LED.
If you want to print photos, send out for it; it will be cheaper anyway.
It was limited to black and white though.
I've had zero cases where I needed to print color. If I want to print photos I just order them at Shutterfly and pick them up in less than an hour at the Walgreens around the corner.
I picked up a Brother (L3510CDW) colour laser + scanner a few years ago. It was slightly more expensive than a bubblejet, but consumables and maintenance will mean TCO is way lower. Brother seem to have some of the better support for GNU/Linux & CUPS these days - this thing Just Worked (over the network, too) on Debian with I think one package from the standard repos.
Also, the printer from your childhood was limited to black and whatever colour paper you fed into it, not black and white.
I meant ‘are they being produced anymore’, ‘would you still recommend them’, etc.
>> Also, the printer from your childhood was limited to black and whatever colour paper you fed into it, not black and white.
I wouldn’t have known - it’s not exactly like I was the person purchasing the toner, and I was simply told by my Dad that it printed in black and white only.
At that age, I was just grateful to be able to print my Winnie-the-Pooh fan fiction. :P
It's a bit of a trope, people calling monochrome printers black & white -- they don't print the white areas, of course. Some light-yellow paper would have been appropriate for the fanfic. : )
For photo prints, you are far better off just paying per page for commercial products, though color lasers are pretty good for simple things like colored charts. A really good color printer costs a lot; it's far cheaper to rent the use of one when you need it.
I used an HP LaserJet 4+, upgraded to 4M+ by adding a PostScript board, and adding memory to get it into the 30-something MB range. That was 12 ppm printing speed. I replaced it with a much-lighter Brother HL-2140 (22 ppm) when I had owned it for about 10 years, during which I replaced the toner once. The Brother is now almost 10 years old, still working just fine, though I have replaced the toner twice.
I could replace it, but why? It still does what I bought it to do.
Lost soundscapes, like playing a computer cassette out loud or hearing a modem dial up have a really nostalgic power for me.
I wonder, what sound is current now that will disappear in the future?
Car engines for one I’d bet.
The manufacturers generally don't fuck around with their laser lines.
If it's color and they don't have a machine identification code (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code) then you have a real gem. They actually respect you as a customer.
The autofeed tray was broken, but the manual feed tray still worked.
A steal at $100 and cheaper, easier and more reliable even in the short run than trying to unclog the 2 inkjets my wife and I both brought to the marriage.
Marriage: Pick your battles.
The quality is not as good as the very best inkjets but it’s good enough if you’re not exhibiting your photos.
The reliability though is amazing. I have an old Selphy printer from the 90s that still works perfectly from certain cameras. There’s nothing to dry out or spill.
It just works.
I have replaced it but only because the USB implementation seems too old to be recognised by many modern devices.
The Selphy I replaced it with I expect to run and run.
For everything else I use a Brother colour laser.
Canon, Epson or HP inkjets are a fool’s purchase. I’ve been that fool before, never again.
Tried the recommended things to fix but couldn't fix. I liked the quality of the prints even if they were a bit pricey per print.
Upright design of ES1 didn't help, since the paper must do a 90 degree turn like it's performing a stunt! Just to reach the output tray. All in a creaking plastic box. I respect Canon cameras but not my old Selphy ES1. Sorry!
Got an Epson photo eco-tank and it's good. No stress about running out of ink. Nozzles haven't clogged and I like the quality, it is well made printer the Epson ecotank, at least the model I have.
Previous Epson printers - hated the cost of ink and clogged nozzles.
I wonder how much paper I need to go through to get myself an Epson end of life message! I doubt I will print/waste that much paper. Funny how some are concerned about the e-waste implications of printing a truck load of A4.
I've only used the CP range of Selphy printers. These are flat, horizontal designs where the paper travels out one side and back again. They sound much simpler mechanically than a vertical machine.
I think I pay about £0.20 to £0.40 a photo (paper + ink) where as my local supermarket prints for about £0.07 each, so there are cheaper options but I'd bet still cheaper than buying and running a high end Epson inkjet.
I buy bulk paper+ink packs and print pretty rarely. Since it never goes off (I've used 20 year old stock before) it just sits in the box until the family comes round.
I'm glad you're getting good service from your inkjet but I'd never buy another one.
What I really hated about my Epson and Canon inkjets is the driver software. It's overly big and very rent seeky. It tries desperately to sell you stuff like ink, paper or photo storage, none of which is competitive price wise. On the Mac I needed third party software to remove it completely.
The experience soured me on both brands, (old Selphy printers excluded).
It's not that straightforward to modify the machine to make the parts user replaceable. I know in Canon inkjets, at least, this was my least favourite job - the entire printer has to be disassembled from the top-down (including a number of springs and the decoder strip) to get to the pads. Most of the cost is in labour, not the parts.
I'm not aware of that happening.
Looking at the video linked in the article showing Epson waste ink pad replacement, it actually looks like a pretty simple process with a couple of screws. Much easier than Canon's procedure of disassembling the whole unit from the top down.
But if you add in even just 20 minutes of (messy) labour in the Epson scenario, that's where the cost becomes more than replacing the unit.
It's unfortunate, but at least they don't do what HP does with their inkjets... if we're accusing anyone of malice when it comes to inkjets, it should definitely be HP.
One of my hobbies is rescuing these devices from E-Waste, so I'm acutely aware of them. The huge difference is that these devices are usually pretty out-of-date.
Sure, that first generation iPad that went into an otterbox on day one is just fine, mechanically. But can a normal person use it to do much of anything useful? The youtube app doesn't work. Safari won't load any webpages. The app store loads, but most apps (even compatible ones!) won't install.
Not even just things being "too slow", they can't speak modern protocols.
Printers haven't changed that much. When's the last time there was a change to PostScript that made old printers not just obsolete, but unusable?
These printers are designed to fail.
There's enough E-Waste being generated without these sorts of anti-user moves.
Those old devices you're talking about were thrown out because they are old. Not because they were designed to fail. I pull PowerBooks from this era out of the trash literally every week. They're basically useless to anyone but collectors. They still work! But they're not very useful for modern tasks, for most people. Sure, giganerds like me can get use out of them. But good luck finding software to run on them...
The waste pad on every professional grade inkjet printer I've ever seen is a snap-fit part that costs under $25.
But no, defend this practice of throwing away a printer because a sponge is saturated.
In this case, the printers are literally designed to fail. Once you get to an arbitrary number of uses, you can no longer use them, independently of the device state.
Canon TS302 Wireless Inkjet Printer https://a.co/d/3SjlJbB (not Epson, but cheap inkjet; there were a handful of Epsons under $100).
I solved this problem for our house in the sensible way: with a color HP3600N laser and a B&W multi-function HP (I think a 252), but there’s clearly a cost to make a part user-serviceable that doesn’t strictly have to be and if you’re trying to sell a printer in the $50-90 range, $5 of parts matters.
The outrage is that Epson printers (might?) have a secret page counter and the printers kill themselves after a certain number of pages whether or not the ink pads still work. Even if the user replaces the ink pads, the printer will still refuse to work because the counter is used up.
This sort of behavior is unethical, user hostile, and should be criminal.
Yes it is, and yes it should be. But even if it isn't criminal, it is just begging for a class-action lawsuit.
But all of this is very specific and complex so there isn’t enough demand for laws to mandate such things.
I think the problem is with the fact that this is just not disclosed properly, before a purchase decision is made, as it's not apparent that such a expiry mechanism can exist!
But it definitely wouldn't harm them, so even if the expected benefit is small it's still net positive. Whether it is worth their time to evaluate the market should be the customer's decision to make.
If every time some manufacturer decided to do stupid stuff like this, 80% of their customers returned the devices to get refunds, they would maybe actually stop with the shitty behaviour.
https://github.com/lion-simba/reink
Likewise, custom firmware for printers is an equally underdeveloped niche.
I suspect this is also why printer software/firmware is so terrible to begin with. The best, or even just decent developers are not working on printers.
There is simply no valid reason to buy a consumer inkjet printer.
Your solution involves getting an army of unpaid volunteers to take on a pet project that you think is important. That's not even realistic. If you think it's so important, I look forward to seeing your github page about it.
Oddly it seems like a simpler problem than 3d printers? You could literally even expose a sheet of photo paper pretty well with a formlabs printer if the paper was UV sensitive.
I'm referring to industrial machines using bulk ink (by the barrel), which come with full service literature and have parts availability. Unfortunately, besides the price, they are also relatively low resolution and designed for volume instead of print quality.
If there was demand I'm sure you could get that from China. But it comes at a price.
When I got fed up of poor quality multi-megabyte driver downloads and cartridges that dry put after a month of inactivity I bought a Brother laser printer.
It prints from Windows, Linux and macOS without a driver download and it never dries out.
Many of the important parts in a laser or inkjet printer Have traits like tiny, precise, fluid-tight, even high voltage. And they are only made for printers, they aren’t commodity parts you can just buy. Just getting the parts to make one printer would probably cost 2 orders of magnitude more than buying a printer.
[1] or some company using the Kodak name
In college I bought an HP LaserJet 5. It was old then, well past EOL, but was fully functional and previous owners had added a network card, so Icould add it to my appartment’s network and we all shared it. It printed thousands of pages with no trouble at all.
Recently after starting to WFH I realized how much I like reading contracts or longer docs on actual paper, and how much the kids ask to print work out. I’ve never had an inkjet last more than a year. I found a Canon C743 online second hand, and it’s printed flawlessly and quickly for several years now. It was $175 down from $450, not much more than a high end ink jet. I scan a lot more than I print too, so the AIO is great.
Lasers have quick print times, even better in volume, much more serviceable, don’t dry out, ink lasts ages, etc. the biggest issue with inkjets is that you need to use them often or they dry out, and the cartridges don’t hold much either. To infrequent printers they’re effectively single-use.
Inkjets typically sell themselves on photo quality, but photos are far more economically printed at better quality and consistency at a CVS or Walgreens. Typically our local stores do same day printing of basic photos for very very little, far less than inkjet ink.
Now I get color on every page, and those wonderful, ink jet blacks I’ve been missing. And per page, it’s cheaper! Those laser cartridges are really expensive.
Sure, it’s slow per page, but I only print a page or two at a time.
Oh, and you refill the ink, not replace the cartridge. So if the printer company ever decides to charge $100 for a refill, sourcing it somewhere else should be trivial.
buy a brother black and white laser printer and just don't print stuff in color (or better yet, try really hard to find a reason not to print things at all).
Ink Jet, and Spirit Airlines are how the market figured out how to exploit people's cheapness.
In general borderless printing causes a lot of hassles. A borderless print looks like a traditional photo print in that the printing extends to the edges of the paper but actually the problem is that the printer doesn’t control the position of the paper exactly so it prints an image that extends off the edges of the paper so some traces of ink have to get absorbed.
One consequence is that something on the edge of a borderless print can be cut off so if something is important to the composition you have to leave some extra space.
I hear stories of people who use off-brand inks who have terrible messes with those ink pads used for borderless printing. As resentful as you might get about printer manufacturers, off-brand ink is not consistent with getting good results.
In the printing industry it's nothing new, it's called bleed.
I used to have a printers, but they all turned out to be unreliable and frustrating to use, so I just stopped buying them. Luckily my work and local library has a printer, so I can print documents the couple of times a year I really need one.
Consumables like this should be standardized; if they aren’t, they should be manufactured for a guaranteed minimum period of time by their manufacturer. Maintenance should be something I can do myself, or I can take it to an independent servicer or a dealer.
To be clear I don't think Epson is in the right here. Just trying to find analogous things we already deal with.
I have one of those, but I print so little that I usually have to do the cleaning procedure before printing.
[1] https://www.parts-distribution.com/products/oem-epson-printe...
I bought a Brother inkjet printer instead and it’s day and night. It was a bit expensive but it just works instantly when I need it.
I couldn’t justify the price of a laser printer though. Nor the space it takes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mf...
I would buy an Epson printer if it would remove Gizmodo's ads.
All printers stop working after a certain amount of use. ( see what i did there xD )
tb actually honest, its not really a suprise to me. Same with the ink cartridges they are not empty at all when the printer tells your they are.