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Comment by whitewingjek | Hacker News Reader

> NOTE: The printer only works with original HP toner refill kits. If original HP toner is not installed in the printer, the printer will not work as expected.

Still vendor locked. Rather just stick with something you can refill yourself.

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Looking at the manual, the toner refill kit is entirely passive and has no electrical contacts or other authentication. That's just verbage to scare you into buying their refill kit instead of the inevitable generic version.

Mixing different toner particle sizes and compounds has ended in complete disaster for me in the past. I recall mixing and matching OEM with third party and then the toner not sticking to the paper properly. Guess where it goes if the toner does not end up on the paper and the printer thinks it did? It starts accumulating in the printer leading to a total disaster because now the printer never worked right after that.

Now I just buy my OEM toner used on eBay. Thats the secret. Find a semi new somewhat popular business class printer and keep an eye out for companies offloading their unused OEM toner.

> the toner refill kit is entirely passive and has no electrical contacts or other authentication

Yet.

It seems unlikely that HP will add DRM after the fact. Even if the printer has the hardware capability to enforce DRM, it isn't upon release, so you could simply keep it VLAN-ed off of the internet so it can't update its firmware to a version that begins enforcing the DRM chips. Adding DRM would also create a subpar UX where old, DRM-less HP refills stop working because the firmware thinks they're knockoffs.

I wonder how they could tell though - Maybe the refill bottles themselves have electrical contacts and that's how they serialize the refills? Once it's been dumped into the printer, they burn an efuse on the refill so it's now useless to anybody?

Seems like more waste than anything.

My uninformed guess is an RFID tag in each refill bag. The printer will scan for Genuine Authorized Original Virtuous Toner, and only then allow the fill port to open. Once open you have one hour before that tag ID is burned and can't be used further.

Or maybe you need to use the app and do this? (https://ssl-product-images.www8-hp.com/pub/msc/C26A0B64-54DB...)

Whatever the mechanism, reviews are not good: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-143a-black-original-nev...

If this is how it works, then I don't think they'd burn a tag. People will inevitably do a partial fill or maybe even just open it up to see how it works. And if there are multiple tags, which one does it burn?

The bottles also do not appear to be one time use.

I love how they market that as protecting the end user from counterfeit.

Seems like an interesting reverse engineering project.

I can't speak for this printer, but I have an HP Neverstop 1001NW which uses a similar tank-based system. The container of toner that came with it appeared to be entirely dumb.

uhh.. or maybe just chemistry? you can fill the tank with urine if you want but YMMV.

That's fine for the magenta but what about the cyan, yellow, and black?

You might be eating too many beets ;)

Methylene blue works both as a nootropic and a cyan urine ink source! (Dosing is often roughly "keep going until you pee blue all the time"...)

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