Epson printer no longer recognizes third-party ink after firmware update | Hacker News Reader

Epson printer no longer recognizes third-party ink after firmware update

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54 pointsjosephcsible24 comments

There's a very simple fix for this problem: don't buy inkjet printers. Only buy laser printers. In addition to avoiding this kind of problem, you'll avoid many other problems, such as ink drying out and cartridges needing to be replaced because you didn't print anything for 2 months.

Reccs for good laser printers that accept generic drums and toner? Brother used to be great but newer versions block most 3rd party toners and drums.

I was going to suggest Brother... My last Brother was about 5 years old, and had no trouble with 3rd-party toner carts.

Samsung CLP-310 was the last one you can buy color toner in one liter bottles from Ebay for 10€. Filling those cartridges yourself is messy business. The powder is almost like liquid and stains everything.

BTW. Worth mentioning is that CLP-310 has to be quite new still using its maiden cartridges. Those were chipless and allow only 1000 prints. But you can reset this counter by shorting certain pins and then fill those cartridges 4ever.

CLP-310 motherboard is 45€ on Aliexpress. It might be that by replacing this you can produce a new "maiden" machine. Easy job. I once took CLP-310 apart and then realized that only thing broken was the thermostat on the drum heater, so I replaced that and put everything back together.

Brother has a series called Tonerbenefit, but I think it is only available in Eastern Europe. The initial cost is higher for the printer, but the original toner is dirt cheap.

https://www.brother.sk/printers/laser-printers/hl-b2080dw

Sorry I can’t find a page in English.

Before that I used a Canon inkjet with CISS system, but I have always problem with it. It is good for people who prints a lot every day, I mean really lot and do not care if the printer needs some maintenance.

I have a Samsung laser printer that also pulls this shit.

I had to spend a few days in IDA pro and Ghidra to patch the firmware to remove the ink level checks from all the right places. Would you believe - even the firmware for the roller checks the ink level before reporting it's own health status!

How hard was it to get firmware/flash it in the first place? I assume the driver updates are easy to get but the actual flashing tools always scare me enough to never try stuff like that myself.

I found the firmware in a big FTP index on hp.com (Samsung's printer division was bought by HP).

The actual flashing is normally done by a special print job which has commands to flash each of the ~7 different firmwares onto the right internal components. Yes, that means anyone with access to print on the printer can update the firmware to do absolutely anything...

But, if you're doing firmware hacking and screw it up, the software won't boot sufficiently to be able to be reflashed with that method, so you'll also want to pull the hardware apart so you can get a dump of the flash chip to restore when you mess up.

The hardest bit is not patching the code, but figuring out how the crc's, checksums, and memory layouts work. Get that wrong, and it either won't flash or won't boot.

Do the state attorneys general or FTC not have the authority to stop this? Surely they don’t have the right to disable their hardware with new financial requirements that didn’t exist at the time of purchase.

no, you see, update are important for security, so it is always legal for any company to install, via a backdoor, anything else they want to for any reason, provided it is also possible for them to also fix bugs that they have introduced through the same mechanism.

The best decision of the last gew decades for me was to buy an Epson LQ 500 Dot Matrix printer. Granted, its noisy, but the print quality can rival that of a laser and the cartridges are CHEAP

I've been considering getting a dot-matrix printer since I found a life-time's worth of paper in an old basement I was emptying.

How's printing speed at max quality?

I have another dot matrix printer, 24pin LQ. Wouldn't want it uf I had to print more than 5 pages a day because of the noise. A single page takes about 10-40 seconds depending on quality and content, the 'images' it can do really slow it down.

But the cheap cartridges are all worth it.

Could you share a sample of the output? The last dot matrix I saw was from the 1980s.

I would say this is a good example... even if the ribbon of this guy seems to be at the end of its lifespan:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FkJkSw-REkI

Also the prints are much more stable, the laser-printed documents tend to lose toner if paper is folded or crumpled, while dot-matrix prints are basically as permanent as tattoos.

Would ink refills work by injecting the reservoir? You could keep the same cartridge but keep refilling it with 3rd party cheap ink, no?

HP ink cartridges have a partial vacuum in them. That means when you open them to try and refill them, air gets sucked in and they no longer work.

It's possible to fix by taking the side panel off and squeezing the flexible membrane on the inside to get the air back out again.

Most cartridges these days have chips that keep track of how much ink they've ever released, and they refuse to work once that amount reaches the amount of ink they were shipped with.

I think that these chips are way simpler than that and only estimate the remaining ink based on the number of pages they have printed.

Sure, the details may vary. But the point is that if you don't take care of the chip, the printer will still consider a refilled cartridge to be empty and so refuse to print.

Epson Ecotank printer solved my problem óg hemorrhaging money in ink jet cartridges

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