HP printers should have EPEAT ecolabels revoked, trade group demands | Hacker News Reader

HP printers should have EPEAT ecolabels revoked, trade group demands

arstechnica.com

191 pointsLinuxBender42 comments

I found a surprisingly simple workaround...

Put a resistor, about 1kohm, in the power line to the security chip on the cartridge.

Now, whenever the printer tries to read data from the chip, it works. Whenever it tries to record data to the chip (for example, marking the cartridge as empty), that uses more power, and the memory chip doesn't respond.

Amazingly, the whole setup just works and prints forever, saying the cartridges are always full...

smart!

I found a simple workaround too — not buying HP printers. Nor other HP products.

The method, which is guaranted to work always! And you might even see the ink level.

That’s the “correct” direct action of course. However, other printer brands are ever hard at work to copy HP’s advances. So when buying a printer, make sure to research in depth.

do they actually have any advances worth their intentional maliciousness?

They are currently being manufactured, and HP occasionally acquires superior competitors, then adds this crap to their existing models’ firmware.

I guess that’s an “advance” in their ability to extract rent from 30 year old IP.

I think fuzzy2 was saying other companies want to copy HPs maliciousness and also lock down their own cartridges. "advances" was referring to that maliciousness.

I've heard that it's pointless to research, just go with Brother.

I’ve followed this advice for years, with a 100% success rate

I've had bad luck with third-party toner cartridges on my Brother printer. Eventually it just stop detecting them at all.

Certain newer brother printers are doing some of the things people hate about HP. According to some Reddit threads I saw last month

That used to be true (just like it used to be true about HP, just a lot further back).

Here's Brother starting to be evil: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

I own several HP LaserJet, including the 4M+ "upgraded" with more memory / fonts / an ethernet adapter etc. Amazing machines for the time.

So I'm an "old HP printers" fan. And yet I'd never ever buy anything from HP.

FWIW I'm very happy with Brother. We've got several Brother laser printers and "laser printer + scanner" and we're very happy with these. Zero problem.

HP fell really low.

"Buy a laser printer" is maybe the best workaround. Preferably a slightly older one. Inkjet printers have little competition (3 manufacturers that hold the patents) and are sold in a "give away the razor, sell the blades" type of deal. This is creeping into some of the laser printers lately, and of course there's still differences between brands, but if you pick up a random inkjet printer and a random laser printer you will have far less trouble with the laser printer.

My hp laser printer is unusable right now. I can’t get it to print anything consistently. A week later, it sometimes prints half of what I asked it to print

I own an HP 5850 inktank printer that stats show I've printed 28k pages and around 4k scans.

You just buy a bottle and pour it in the reservoir.

No chips, no updates. No firmware.

It does have the cleaning head issue that jams and says you only can do it 3 times which I suspect is based on number of pages printed and not actual health of head but not sure.

I agree on the Brother laser point. I picked one up for $160 new, just a nice compact black and white laser printer with wireless. It has a simple HTTP status page and all my wired and wireless devices can print to it without issue. Fast, too - it's usually done before I get to the printer.

This is gonna be a hot take, but I use an HP laser from about 2012 or something, which takes cartridges that are like $20 for 18 months’ worth for me ($20 for maybe 3 months when my wife was doing her masters degree), and for the times I need color I have a couple bucks a month HP Instant Ink subscription for my cheap inkjet thing. It’s like $2 for more pages than I need, and I never have to worry about how inefficient inkjet is. I was super skeptical of Instant Ink but at the low price they ask, it solves the problem of color printing quite well for me.

Edit: once I disabled ipv6 on the inkjet. It caused it to drop its IP connectivity completely, about 40 times an hour. Lol. Took hours on the phone with HP to discover that.

That’s brilliant!

So now they'll make software mods to verify the write to that chip.

Article states:

"we should note the IITC's obvious stakes in this. The nonprofit trade association was founded in 2000 and says it represents "toner and inkjet cartridge remanufacturers, component suppliers, and cartridge collectors in North America."

But no mention of the GEC's funding sources and conflicts of interest.

And yes, printer manufacturers suck

Get an Epson EcoTank printer.

Ink for those is available in *bottles* from Epson, it's dirt cheap. No more cartridges!

Make sure to get one which has a user-replaceable "maintenance box", the cheaper ones have a fixed one. You can find that out by e.g. looking at the supplies list on the Epson website, see if the maintenance box is listed alongside the ink.

The box contains the sponge where ink goes to during the cleaning procedure. It needs to be replaced every once in a while. Replacing it is very easy on the user-serviceable ones, the other ones would require mailing it to Epson.

both hp and epson offset the expendable costs on those.

even if you avoid the fixed box trap, you cannot avoid the "replace printer head nozzle" trap that the driver will use to lock you out of your printer in a year or so.

I have printed over 5000 pages with mine, the head is fine (head test printout looks good), I don't know what you're referring to?

To me it rather looks like consumers have been so thoroughly conditioned to distrust printers that they aren't even capable of trusting the good ones anymore maybe - and thus unfortunately keep buying the garbage ones, thinking it doesn't make a difference.

I.e. whenever one of the actual solutions is discussed there's this gossip of "nah, they're also ripping you off" - but I have the thing right behind my desk and it works just fine.

Inkjet as a technology doesn’t stand up well to intermittent use due to ink drying out. I think a lot of consumers buy a printer and use it rarely (idle for weeks at a time). In my experience using an inkjet this way leads to dry ink clogging the head. People don’t easily forget technology letting them down when they needed it.

Does this still happen with current printers or is it one of those ancient memes about printers which don't disappear?

When I turn the Epson one off, it audibly parks the head. I would suppose it is parked onto a gasket which would prevent it from drying out.

Personally, I don't buy laser printers because I cannot imagine that toner dust isn't unhealthy, and I would be scared of it leaking into the air I breathe.

Feel free to prove me wrong with studies, I would appreciate being less scared about it for my next printer in case the Epson does die some day.

I expect it doesn’t matter if you only print occasionally, but toner exposure from operating printers seems to be a significant health risk: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29233006/

It very well could be a problem that has been solved. I have never owned an inkjet personally because of how much trouble my dad had with them when I was a child. I have owned the same laser printer (an HP i found at a second hand computer shop) for the last ten years, and it has basically just worked. I’m just nearing the end of the first tonor cartridge i bought for it, I print relatively rarely, but so far it has just worked every time.

Ecotank ink is water-based and more dilute than the normal stuff, apparently to reduce the liklihood of clogging. It needs a cleaning cycle every few months - that's it.

I've had an Ecotank (ET4500) for at least 5 years and 17,000 pages. The printer head nozzle is fine.

I wish they didn't use glass, I imagine people will be rinsing them in the sink to recycle them

>Make sure to get one which has a user-replaceable "maintenance box", the cheaper ones have a fixed one

That seems really sneaky. Making a sponge replaceable isn't hard or expensive.

I would guess the reason the cheaper ones don't have it is that making it removable implies making it accessible from the outside which implies adding a pump and hoses to pump the ink into it:

The slot for the box at my printer is at the back of it, not at the ink head, so the ink can only get there by pumping it.

(Not defending Epson's design choices here, just trying to explain them.)

This is blatant false advertising on HP's fault. Where are the consumer protection groups?

i made the mistake of buying an hp piece of junk as my latest printer, as it looked like it was an update of an old model from samsung i liked.

it didn't even surpass the duration of the included toner. what an awful piece of hardware. super slow wifi scans, continued nagging about low toner, hard to acquire compatibles due to the "security chip".

switched to a brother, seems way better but time will tell. in any case I think this is my last all-in-one, probably a scanner and a small laser printer are better bets in the long term. space and automatic document feeder are important tho

+1 The HP laserjet that I bought 5 years ago turned out to be a piece of junk. The software was also awful, it would often randomly crash, reboot itself and make lots of noise. Using a Canon Maxify inkjet now, much better machine and much cheaper to run.

Again it is very much an Inkjet problem. If only we could somehow get Colour Laser to sell below say $149.

Color lasers are available for $250. I challenge you to find an inkjet that is cheaper over a 24 month period, regardless of print volume.

There used to be $150 color lasers from samsung, but HP acquired the business.

People are just buying far fewer printers, so they're desperate for new ways to monetize printing. If consumer laser jets became more popular they'd find a way to monetize those too.

Yeah, it's so much cheaper to rent a printer by way of FedEx the few times a year I need a printer.

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