Computersight -

Your Inkjet Printer is Lying to You

I’d like to highlight an issue that I hadn’t found out about until very recently, maybe it’s old news to some but I feel it’s important enough to review. Several weeks ago I started a new job at a factory which makes printer cartridges for the UK and Europe. For legal reasons (and for fear of losing my job) I won’t go into detail about which company it is, but you should know it’s a Japanese company based in the UK.

As far as I was aware, when a cartridge ran out of ink, that was that. Naively I thought that these cartridges would display the correct ink levels whenever you went to print something off, this is certainly not the case.

The other day, while at work, I was being taught how to build a printer cartridge from scratch. The particular section of the production line I was working on was called the C08 chip line, the purpose of which was to program a small microchip and attach it it to the inside of a printer cartridge. After working in this section for a few days I noticed something strange.

When the chip was being programmed, several lots of numbers came up on my screen, It would look something like this:

2010×01x01×55 or 2011×11x04×45

I just assumed it was some kind of serial number, but being a computer geek I had to find out what it was for. Surely there are billions of these cartridges produced every year and a 13 digit serial number just seemed an odd way of keeping track of them.

After a week, curiosity got the better of me and I asked one of the technicians about it. What he told me made me quite angry. He said, “The first three lots of numbers are the cartridges expiry date, separated by an x”.

Basically every printer cartridge was programmed not to work after a certain date. If you buy a cartridge and decide that you want to wait a year to print something off, you’ve pretty much had it. Even if the cartridge is completely full and in full working order it will shut down.

The technician went on to explain, “The last two digits are the maximum number of sheets that the cartridge will print”. So in addition to having a short lifespan, if your cartridge is half full after printing 45 sheets (the standard for these cartridges) then the chip will still tell your pc that it is empty.

Now fair enough I can expect this from a small obscure Japanese company but I have discovered that both HP and Epson are being sued for this kind of scam too. It is clear that these companies are guilty of what can only be described as fraud.

In addition to HP, Epson and my employers it is clear that there are many other smaller companies which are involved in this con. I think very soon you will see the prices of cartridges fall dramatically. Both due to the realisation of this scam and due to the current financial climate. Hopefully the printing companies will disband this scheme and take a more honest approach to business. Whatever the outcome it’s important to remember that as consumers we have a choice of what and where we buy it