How to get your lying printer to use up all its ink

http://slate.com/id/2198316/

by fmanjoo • 18 years ago

58 38 18 years ago

maximilian• 18 years ago

I have just that laser printer in the article. I'll have to bookmark this site for later and keep my black electrical tape at the ready.

shard• 18 years ago

This is a major reason why I eBay'd an old LaserJet4 when I needed a printer. It's built like a Mack truck, and it doesn't play games with toner levels.

pmjordan• 18 years ago

I've got a LaserJet 5 with a duplex unit. The thing weighs a ton, will happily break your back if you try to transport it, and will occasionally get itself into paper jam when you need something printed NOW (mine has thus earned the print queue name of 'satan'), but I still love it. Just gotta keep a parallel port around to plug it into...

Tichy• 18 years ago

What about ozone emissions? Somehow I would feel uneasy around dinosaur printers.

cstejerean• 18 years ago

I actually went to Best Buy to get some ink when I realized that instead of paying $70 for new ink I could spend $100 and get a wireless laser printer (a Brother 2170w). Sounds like this trick could come in handy.

zenspider• 18 years ago

afaik, almost all new printers come with half-full ink/toner cartridges.

gizmo7• 18 years ago

The Brother HL-2040 only costs around $83 or so (newegg). I have one, and I'm very happy with it. Fast. Tidy. Quiet. It's a great printer. For $80 bucks it's an absolute steal.

The toners aren't free, but the price per page is very very low. I think it's in the top 5 of home laser printers. We're talking a few cents per copy here (including paper). A great deal once again. I researched the different printers before I bought one, and I knew full well that Brother can't make much profit on the laser printer itself - so the toners are more expensive. This is great, because this way people who print only semi-regularly can still get affordable laser printers.

Manjoo the author agrees with me: great printer and very inexpensive. So what makes the author think he is getting cheated? Why does he think Brother owes him anything? Why does he feel so outraged? The guy would be HAPPY if the toner ran out 20% earlier, but then he'd have faded pages for a while. Brother decides to put some more ink in there (doesn't cost them much) so the quality is high all the way to the end, and then the toner shuts down.

"Fight back against the lying infuriating evil ink-and-toner cabal?". Please. Thanks to companies like Brother you can get great printers for less than $100. Your efforts to put them out of business by cheating their business model are petty.

Who is -really- the greedy and infuriating party here?

josefresco• 18 years ago

Brother.

gizmo7• 18 years ago

Don't like 'em? Don't buy their products.

davidw• 18 years ago

> so the quality is high all the way to the end, and then the toner shuts down.

I think most people are aware that the ink is a finite resource, and are happy to change it when they see the level is getting low and not producing good results. Let them judge when that is.

gizmo7• 18 years ago

The ink is not the expensive part. Brother could probably cut the price of toners in half and still make a profit. But by doing so, they'd get fewer recurring revenues, which means that the price of the printer itself would have to go up.

Either that, or they lose out on profits.

You wouldn't be angry if the toner contained less fuel. If you could print only 2000 pages instead of 3000, you would think you got a great deal. But if you can print 2000 pages, and the printer then refuses to print the last 1000, you're suddenly upset? Makes no sense. You're still getting essentially the same deal: 2000 pages for $60.

iigs• 18 years ago

Everybody gets so mad about this because a lot of printer vendors go out of their way to force you to not use materials or resources that you purchased, and presumably the only reason is for them to make more profit.

It would be one thing if the printer had a red flashing button that you had to push to override the forced stop (i.e. an explicit, vendor-approved method of opting out of quality in favor of using up something you paid for). Some product owners are fortunate enough to have (generally accidentally) selected products that can be overridden via vendor-unapproved hacks.

While it's quite benevolent that companies like Brother choose to give us "great printers for less than $100", I don't feel that they're beyond reproach for selling me a container of liquid or powder at an exceptionally high price and telling me i can't have the last 5-10% of it for any reason.

It absolutely is infuriating to have a printer that is fully capable of printing a sheet of paper, except that it has been programmed not to.

gizmo7• 18 years ago

> It absolutely is infuriating to have a printer that is fully capable of printing a sheet of paper, except that it has been programmed not to.

No, that is exactly the deal you agreed to when you bought the printer. That's the whole point of inexpensive printers. Buy high-end printers if you want lower per-page costs.

You, the customer, make the choice. There's no lying involved by anybody. The terms were perfectly clear up front.

sh1mmer• 18 years ago

I'd like to point out no-one is cheating them out of their business models, they aren't updating their business models to the market.

Printers are getting cheaper to make. They keep lowering their prices to stay competitive. In order to keep making increasing profits they have adopted the Razor blade model.

Rather than innovating they are lying to customers to try and keep them spending. I don't mind a printer that warns me I might be about to run low, if it's off by weeks or a month I can live with that. I do mind a printer that forces me to waste.

gizmo7• 18 years ago

A company needs to increase its profits or it will die. This is self-evident. Your italics seem to imply that increasing profits by itself is unethical? Didn't expect to read that on HN.

You're claiming Brother isn't innovating. As far as I know printers have gotten cheaper, faster, more accurate, lighter and produce less curly paper. Sounds like innovation to me. Did you just make that no innovation claim up - or do you have supporting evidence? [%]

Your misconception is that when you buy a toner you somehow pay for an amount of ink. You don't. The guarantee, when you buy a toner, is that you can pay 3000 or so pages of text before it runs out. If you get your 3000 pages you should be happy. If Brother uses a page counter to brick the toner as soon as I hit 3000 pages I wouldn't be outraged. After all, that's what I paid for.

You're not buying milk here. Milk you buy by the gallon. If you get less than the advertised weight you feel cheated. But here they don't even advertise the amount of powder in the toner. It's not relevant. It's pages you get. [^]

If brother would improve the efficiency of the printer by 2 then they could halve the fuel in the toner (without lowering the price) and you'd get the same amount of pages per toner. You'd be OKAY with that - because you're NOT PAYING FOR THE AMOUNT OF INK. You're paying for a (lower boundary on) pages you can print with a single toner.

If you want to buy ink in the same way you buy milk (which makes sense in a way, because some pages use more ink than others) then you'd be right. If you buy a 10 ounce toner you deserve 10 ounces of fuel. But that's very clearly not the case here.

The waste argument is valid, but it's simply an unavoidable result of our economy. Appliances are simply getting cheap, so waste becomes the rational attitude. Dishes dirty? Buy new ones. Dropped the coffee pot? Buy a new machine. Washer broken? Guess what? New one. Fan in computer rattles? Oh yes. Dell.com to the rescue. I agree that waste is bad, but toners are insignificant compared to waste in the general sense.

[%] Aside (and may not apply to you): people tend to make up arguments to support their position if they have made up their mind "intuitively". Rationalizing if you will. If you felt intuitive outrage on this toner issue, step back and re-evaluate. You might still come to the same conclusion, but you would definitely use different arguments.

[^] They do say "assuming 5% coverage", which is a bit of a slippery slope

kenver2• 18 years ago

It's a bit absurd that in many cases it's actually cheaper to throw your printer away and buy a new one, rather than replace a multicolour cartridge.

gizmo7• 18 years ago

And a single dvd can cost $30. I've seen DVD players for less.

netcan2• 18 years ago

If only they came with a free sample dvd.

dmpayton• 18 years ago

Indeed.

I recently bought an HP D2400 printer at Big Lots for $30. The color/black cartridges come out to around $40. Go figure.

maryrosecook• 18 years ago

The practice of charging more for the media than the device is not uncommon. Example: Polaroid.

kenver2• 18 years ago

Yea thats true, but if buying a polaroid camera and getting say 10 pictures with it included was cheaper than buying 10 of the media seperately it would be a bit crazy, and thats exactly what I've seen with some printers recently.

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

And, of course, razor blades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_business_model

mattmaroon2• 18 years ago

That's generally untrue only because the printer usually comes with a reduced capacity cartridge. Also, generic ink is pretty damn cheap.

SwellJoe• 18 years ago

Epson, at least, uses a formulation that leads to most generic inks causing irreparable clogs. I dunno how they do it, but I've seen it happen in two Epson printers--worked fine for a few months, switch off to a non-Epson ink (of different brands in each case) and within a week the printer doesn't work. No printing, at all, just makes noise and moves its little bastard head around doing nothing. When researching the topic, I found that design professionals (who print a lot, and use the big non-cartridge ink systems) recommend never using Epson inks to start with, and always using the generic brand you plan to use for the life of the printer...which apparently makes this problem go away.

Of course, after five dead inkjet printers (HP, Epson, Lexmark, HP, Epson) I finally got pissed off enough to refuse to buy another one. Ever. I bought a networked Konica Minolta color laser for about $800 six years ago, or so, and it's served me well ever since, and cost less than another five inkjet printers and their outlandish ink prices. I've only had to replace one toner cartridge (black) in that time, and I expect to get another few years out of the printer. It also has Postscript support, so I don't have to think about drivers (which is irrelevant to some folks, but I never want to spend an afternoon fighting with printers again...and a networked Postscript printer is the only way to guarantee that I don't have to).

When my dad started talking about buying a new inkjet after his third HP started banding badly (and new cartridges, and cleaning, didn't fix it) I bought him a $200 laser printer. Best $200 ever. I buy him a new toner cartridge every year for Christmas...it's held up great for three or four years now.

pmorici• 18 years ago

This is so true. When I first bought my printer 3 years ago the guy at the store told me the ink cartridge was a small one so it was going to run out fast so I should buy an extra. my low ink light has been on for over a year now yet the print outs still look great.

JMiao• 18 years ago

remember when creed from the office dyed his hair w/ the office inkjet?

dhimes• 18 years ago

I also wonder about that "engine maintenance" light in our cars, too. It's almost always for maintenance stuff which is, for lack of another word, "elective" (at least at the time).

mattmaroon2• 18 years ago

I love my Canon I860 mainly because it's easy to override the nag screen, and it breaks the colors down into multiple cartridges meaning I don't have to replace the whole thing just because blue ran out. That always pissed me off.

mleonhard• 18 years ago

I want an ink-jet printer with a very large ink canister, enough to print 20,000 pages. Then we could have competition to see who can make those 20,000 pages of ink fit in a smaller canister.

How to get your lying printer to use up all its ink

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