Epson Programs Some Printers To Stop Operating, Claiming Danger Of 'Ink Spills'

Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Want to do something useful today? Write Epson and tell them that this is not acceptable.

It makes no sense to come up with the "ink tank" idea and then pull stupid stuff like this. If ink pads are a problem, they should've engineered the thing to make ink pad replacement certificably end-user replaceable instead. Artificial device death is not acceptable, and we'll just have to (gleefully, if you wish) hammer that into any manufacturer until they get it.

Letters to the FTC asking them to investigate would be more productive, though. https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/... [ftc.gov] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/ [ftc.gov]

For photos, a good ink jet still is significantly better as it can have a much wider color space.

Sure, but how many people print the sort of things that need that? You can't print photos on normal paper anyway. Most people I know go to the local mall with a USB stick when they want to print some photos.

It's madness to print out PDFs and shopping lists using carefully color-graded inks that cost more than Chanel #5.

You can't print photos on normal paper anyway.

And that's relevant why? If you want a printer to print a high quality there's a good chance that you bought the appropriate stationary. There are still plenty of people who want / require quality prints.

Most people I know go to the local mall with a USB stick when they want to print some photos.

Same, but they are those who have laser printers at home. I also know people who don't.

There are still plenty of people who want / require quality prints.

I never said there weren't.

I'm questioning why we have to print our school homework using such expensive ink.

Where are the inkjets with inks that can't print photos and where the prints are going to fade in 20 years time? Surely they should be really cheap and widely available?

Or maybe this is all just a big con by printer makers.

I've got prints I made on a Canon i950 back around 2005. They're still as vibrant as when I printed them. Of course, it helps that they are framed behind (but not touching) glass and not exposed to direct sunlight. (Amusingly, I also have a print from the same year, printed on Kodak photographic paper, framed and displayed in the same manner, and it is faded as hell)

That aside, apparently you haven't heard about pigment-based inkjet printers, which are generally considered to be the top of the line option f

I apologize for that. I'll have may head checked at the earliest convenience.

Inkjet printers are better than lasers at printing photos, but they're still rubbish at that too.

It sounds like you are expecting a $50 inkjet to print lab quality photos. In other news I have it under good authority that no car on the road goes faster than 170km/h because that's the top speed of my utter shitbox, and the *only* alternative is to race in an F1 car.

That's the kind of ignorance you're displaying.

Laser printers aren't great for photos, but it's cheaper to just use an online photo printing service or go to a local shop, than it is to buy a photo printer.

HP ink is considerably more expensive per litre than human blood.

Want to do something useful today? Don't buy scam-enabling inkjets.

I can't think of a single reason the average person would want an inkjet printer. Inkjets are specialty printers these days.

Print your "photos" at the local mall print shop, it's way cheaper and better quality.

I'm still using an HP LaserJet 4L which is 30 years old. Makes perfect prints and now recycled cartridges are very cheap.

I'd expect more success and impact (not to mention fun and profit) from making a YouTube channel that tells people what printers to buy and which ones to avoid. People do actually watch that, and that way you're not just some nobody who already bought one of their printers and thus is already useless to them, you're someone who deprives them from more dupes falling for their crap.

And that's something they care about, unlike you and your letter after you already handed them your money.

I hit an ink pad issue last year with mine.

To be fair, it's a legitimate issue - the ink pads can only soak up so much ink. But the pads were pretty straightforward to clean out (and would be even easier to replace if Epson had designed it that way), yet there's no way a user can reset the counter. I had to bring my printer in to a repair shop to do that last step.

The annoying thing was that this was "secret". No buyer knows about this issue before it hits them. And there's things you can do to help avoid triggering it - e.g. limiting nozzle cleanings and marginless printing. But you can't do that if you don't know the problem exists.

there's no way a user can reset the counter.

https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

There's even special programs to do it:

https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

Okay, let me rephrase: without buying some iffy third-party Windows software that does god-knows what else.

In the USA - a better thing to do is contact the FTC (or similar regulatory agency) and your state attorney general and suggest that epsons behavior might be illegal. Itâ(TM)s an election year in the USA and these officials need press releases

So first your Epson printer kills your wallet, and then it kills itself?

This is the first piece of computing equipment to need serious psychotherapy.

They need to be told about the French Revolution.

Do they have education in America?

They used to, but a few decades ago they introduced "no child left behind" or some nonsense, and it's all been going downhill from that point on.

It doesn't matter whether it's legal, "I did it on the orders of a corporation" is an unwritten defence for most crimes in most countries. The police are only interested in enforcing laws against people acting outside of the corporate system. That's because the primary duty of the police in a capitalist society is to protect capital, not to serve the public. Police who served the public would look the other way when a billionaires yacht was stolen, instead of looking the other way when a homeless person's blanket is stolen, and capitalism can't work like that. The only way to stop it is to move to a post-capitalist society of some kind.

Sounds like a "Nuremburg defense"...and history tells us all how that turned out for many of those defendants.

3-2-1 DROP! or "Ready! Aim! Fire!"

Why is your printer flopping? My Brother printer is now well over a decade old and works just fine. Don't just accept that things break as fact.

It's perfectly legal for a device to be limited use ... providing it is stated as such up front. I suspect Epson very much may have opened them up to legal issues if they didn't advertise this as "capable of printing up to X pages".

Well, the ink might spill onto the scanner as well. Naturally, we have to shut them both down. For safety's sake, of course. Think of the children. Especially our children. Those violin lessons aren't going to pay for themselves.

The more general problem here is using dumb counters instead of measuring the remaining lifespan of the component. That counts for ink/toner cartridges too. The printer doesn't measure the amount of ink/toner left, it just keeps a count of (in the best case) how much ink/toner was used, or (in the worst case) how many pages were printed.

It's reasonable in some situations, e.g. my scanner counts pages to determine when the only consumable part (the paper roller thing) is likely near EOL, which probably does

This has been a well-known fact about Epson printers for over 2 decades.

The inkjet carriage path has a section containing a special cloth sponge reservoir. When you "clean" the heads, it goes there and tries to spray ink into the cloth in an attempt to clean the heads.

The system keeps track of the total ink sprayed into the reservoir, and when it deems the reservoir "full" (ie - the cloth is soaked with ink), the printer will throw an error, and the online fix is "purchase a new printer". There's no easy way for the consumer to replace the cloth pieces, and in any event it would be a messy job.

I've had a couple of these apart. The reservoir is huge and the pads were not nearly full (over half the sponge volume was still pristine), and there's no realistic way to reset the error. It's a counter somewhere in the microcode, and without knowledge of where this counter is stored you can't reset it. (And this assumes that you have the ability to reprogram the micro *and* the security flag has not been set.)

Search "Epson printers suck" sometime on YouTube. You can find people smashing their $4000 high-end Epson printer with a sledge hammer because they're fed up with Epson quality and service.

There's no easy way for the consumer to replace the cloth pieces

And yet a video in TFS shows that it is very easy to replace, you can even do it with household items if the vendor is that much of a dick to not give spare parts.

and in any event it would be a messy job.

Oh noes, not messy! You want messy, try changing the oil of your car, something that many people around the world trivially did themselves back before cars got fancy.

Last week I took apart one that had been left at the curb. It was quite a fun surprise to get to that part and have it piss "squid ink" on me, but fortunately it's all water soluble. Unlike my mom, I don't feel an urge to put photographs on paper, so I'm quite happy with a color laser printer. The best part is they don't dry out when you print about a page a month, and toner is cheaper than ink even when half of isn't being squirted away to "clean" the mechanism.

The most interesting part had to be the litt

Unlike my mom, I don't feel an urge to put photographs on paper, so I'm quite happy with a color laser printer.

You tell your mom to use a printing service which will put photos on real photo paper with real photo chemical processes and end up with a real photograph. Better yet, the cost of one of these is on the order of 5 cents. The cost for special photo paper and all that for an inkjet runs closer to a dollar per print.

I have a black and white laser printer, and use a photo printing service at your local

...I used service a bunch of wide format HP inkjet printers back around 2000. They had reservoirs that would hold the ink that was purged during cleaning and priming. We would have to open the printers every couple of years, clean the rubber wiper, and scrape out the reservoir. If we didn't the print heads would always be smeared with goopy partially dried ink and wouldn't print well. Never had any spill out of the printer and make a mess though... not even sure that's possible unless a cartridge were to just piss itself all at once.

Anyway, I call bullshit on Epson, ink dries faster than the printer would ever spray it on the pad, at most it will just form a thick goopy layer on the pad that might eventually build up to the point that it touches the print head and makes it impossible to get good prints.

Brother seems to be the only manufacturer that doesn't pull that kind of shit. Well, at least not with all their printers, sadly some of them have a very similar vendor-lock-in scheme in operation.

Yes! I'll gladly pay extra for a Brother for this reason. I just bought a new one after having the old one for 15 years (I wanted duplex and a scanner). Some Epson, Canon, HP models had great reviews but they weren't even in the running. It was just a matter of which Brother model do I want to get. (The 3290 is great, btw)

I have seen this issue, actually.

No, not preprogrammed printer death, but saturated ink sponges.

In large volume printers, like HP Designjet large format jobbies, the sponge trays are a consumable that are supposed to be replaced in cadence with the print heads.

In desktop printers, they are tucked away in a location that you have to completely dismantle the printer to get to, have no FRU number to look up for a replacement, and are what absorbs the ink when you do an 'unclog printhead' cycle. (Which desktop printers seem to need done pretty routinely).

I have seen these get saturated, to the point they no longer function, and 'vaguely purple' black goop accumulates inside the printer's enclosure.

You can often painlessly wash them out with distilled water, assuming you can get them loose from thier retention system. (Which is more often than not, designed in such a way as to prevent this) However, that leaves no way to tell the printer's firmware that you have addressed the issue.

The sensible solution is to put a service hatch there, make the retention system easily worked on, and provide instructions for cleaning the pads. Add a sensor that detects pad removal to detect that service has been performed, etc.

That would not align with the 'gillette razorblades' business model, though.

As such, such sensible solutions are purposefully avoided by the mfg.

You see removable trays in commercial printers for this very reason, but not in consumer models.

There are tools out there to reset the counter, has been for at least a decade. Google "Epson wic"

Absolutely. My first printer was an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. It was great.

I remember in my youth when Epson printers were the best available for the home and small business user.

That was a fairly short period. I pad a Panasonic dot matrix printer attached to my Amiga because it was cheaper, faster, quieter, and had better print quality than the competing Epson... but would emulate it.

I read HP and Canon printers refuse to scan even when an ink cartridge is low/not working: https://www.extremetech.com/el... [extremetech.com] and https://www.mouseprint.org/202... [mouseprint.org]. Which modern printers will work then? Also, still works with USB cables without networks like LAN and Internet.

My Brother MFC-L8690CDW. It will show empty toners when it thinks they're empty, but it's fairly straightforward to tell it that they're full again.

Why you'd want to plug that monster into a USB port is beyond me, but you can do it. I plugged it onto the LAN without internet access. Works great.

My Canon TS3300 has been in "low black ink" status for months but still scans fine, as it should be. I bought it on sale in a grocery store of all places, because it was cheaper than a stand-alone scanner. My next printer will be a Brother, though. And laser.

I mean very decent used laser printers from the 1990s are available for roughly the same price as new inkjet printers. Usually they even come with semi-full toner cartridges which will still last longer than a cheap inkjet printer will last. New cartridges are typically availiable at low prices.

The stupidest error I've seen, and I'm not sure if it's macOS, the printer and/or the driver, but I was on a Mac setup in French Canadian but the damn thing thought I was using A4 paper. All of Canada uses Letter paper, like the U.S.

Companies: stop tying language and country to some fixed values. Let me use ISO dates, 24-hour clocks, french language, metric units and American-sized paper.

I have 3 instances of a workhorse laser printer (HP 4100n). Home, college office and wife's college flat. However, I also have an A3 inkjet (Canon IP850). This is for printing photographs. No laserjet I know of prints photos well.

Exactly. I printed Baby shower announcements and thank yous on an Epson Photo Printer. The cost of the printer + photo paper / envelopes was less than having them printed elsewhere.

Quality. Don't get me wrong I'm fully on board with laser printers and have one myself, but there are still very much people out there who need the quality of inkjet, or maybe even something better than that.

Well but inkjets are worse than laser for general documents, and if you want to print photographs there are way better alternatives.

I tried the used laser printer shuffle. Had a hplj2100dtn. It stopped feeding paper right so I did a roller kit. It still didn't feed paper right. So I had the choice to dig in and fix it or just buy another printer, which is what I did. Now I have a modern brother laser MFC and it's been a big improvement in every way anyhow despite barely being more expensive than a refurb'd 2100. It's quieter, it uses less power, duplex is faster... I just don't think it actually makes sense to take a chance on a used la

But to use a fax, you need a landline. And nobody should be using that anymore in 2022 - both the landline and the fax.

I agree in general, but lots of businesses demand you use fax, so if you want to do business with them, you need to fax.

Last time I needed to fax I got a redfax subscription. But if you do it all the time, it might make sense to use actual fax.

Seconded. My Brother printer does show that the toners are "empty" and that I should replace it, but a simple "nope, keep printing" is all it takes to resume operation.

Granted, that "nope" comes in the way of a "press these buttons and hope that it registers, here's a video that shows you what supersecret handshake the printer expects from you", but it doesn't involve buying some sort of "reset" gear to dupe some mandatory obsolence chip into thinking it's new..

The average person doesn't, that doesn't mean that 50% of people aren't above average. We go through several hundred pages a month, nothing to do with governments. Some jobs require it. Some professions require it. Some people work from home. Some people run their own business.

Not everyone lives in a megapolis/city/town with an "Officeworks" or equivalent.

Over time, these pads become saturated with ink though generally not "before the printer is replaced for other reasons"

"We know our printers are garbage, so we don't expect the buyer to actually use it for more than one or two prints before noticing it themselves"

I can reasonably fix EPSON and their quality is great. They are probably the only one left with normal ink pumps stored IN PRINTER which I can soak (with water) to clean and will last a while. The others have disposable print heads on the expensive wasteful cartridges. I can in theory print many other kinds of ink-- people have used them to print circuits for example (conductive ink.) You can get hacked ink cartridges that CA law forced them to allow (with infinite warnings that are annoying if you upgra

All printers have ink reservoirs where unused ink when cleaning the inkjet goes... or do you think the used ink is spilled over the inner circuits?

All printers have porous inkpads that will saturate over time. In fact, I had to trash a perfectly printing Brother because the OFFICIAL SERVICE said it was too much to bother and that I should go back to them when the printer stopped printing.

What happened? That the inkpads were so saturated with trash ink that when moved it spilled all over the circuits and rui

Disabling millions of items of personal property of others, totaling in the tens of millions.

Lots of people are sitting in jail for far less.

Criminal law fir us, civil law for them. Actually, not even that. It is arbitration for them.

It is weird how companies routinely rob people of property that they own, and everyone chats about it like it is a technicality.

You own it, they do not.

How did people give up the rights to things they bought and paid for.

Oh BROTHER! My old laser DIED with a bogus error because Brother decided I needed to buy another one. I even had parts to fix it. only the MB replacement made it work again.

Lasers pollute a lot; maybe the worst. Lasers are complex machines and they still charge too much; if you refill your inkjet yourself then nothing is cheaper to run. Even the old amazing WAX xerox printers!

All printers are a scam; today they are also quite desperate to remain profitable.

Cars are a scam, but only as a whole. Replacing them with a bicycle flatly won't work for most people on the planet who currently drive, so every time someone makes that suggestion, a fairy loses its wings. But almost nobody actually is better served by owning an inkjet than owning a laser. Most people would be way better off having cheap quality B&W output. Who's the exception? People who do a small but constant amount of printing where color is actually required, or people who are printing small quant

The comedian Dave Gorman, on his "Modern Life is Good..ish" show, once offered an Epson printer free to the first audience member who put up their hand.

He then outlined the cost of the ink, so the audience member who had initially wanted it then changed their mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

It was not required by law; you show me the law. What happened is in the 90s when ink jets began to print close to fake money (but before it common ones could) the USA secret service (in charge of counterfeits) made a deal with the manufacturers to get them to help track printing and scanning to curb the problem before it developed. The companies cooperated with what I believe was a secret private agreement that I do not think was ever codified and only some of the details were disclosed -- not all the deta

It was not required by law; you show me the law.

OK, it's "required by the spooks".

Epson has LONG been on my personal “do not buy” list. I have never once used a digital imaging device from Epson that didn’t make me want to smash it. If the hardware is ok, the software is a hot mess, and vice versa. In a few cases I encountered both hardware and software were garbage.

If you need a printer, buy a laser printer. I’ve always had good luck with HP (go for the business models) and Brother has a pretty solid reputation from other people’s experiences. If it says Ep

Didn't GM already do that with their EV1 back in the late 1990s? People were only allowed to lease the car and in 2002, under the terms of the lease, they demanded the return of all of them, which they subsequently destroyed.

It will be interseting to see lease costs for EV's, since a year lease with 45K miles could very well leave it with ~50% battery life,

Meanwhile in the real world, EV battery packs are generally *warrantied* for more than 100k miles, with typical lifespans of a couple hundreds of thousands of miles. And here's the charge degradation curve [electrek.co] for Tesla Model S/X.

Meanwhile in the real world, EV battery packs are generally *warrantied* for more than 100k miles, with typical lifespans of a couple hundreds of thousands of miles.

To be fair, battery technology is a lot better now than it was in 26 years ago when the EV-1 was released. You can credit two things for this: laptop computers and cell phones.

But there's still no excuse for what GM did. They are, however, paying for it: they were a decade ahead of the competition in electric vehicle research and development, and they made a deliberate decision to trash the technology, destroy all the cars, destroy all the infrastructure, and lay off all the researchers. As a result, they

"I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow."

Correct about the gibberish part.

No, electric vehicle batteries don't drop to 50% capacity in a year.

The GM EV-1 used a nickel-metal-hydride battery. Beautiful tech for 1996. Car companies had billions of dollars of money wrapped up in gasoline car tech, though, and worked hard to kill it (along with oil companies, of course). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Here's a quote from Ovshinsky (looking back on GM's acquisition of his patents, which was then bought out by Texaco/Chevron): "I think we at ECD m

rental of vehicles = they cover all UPKEEP costs other then fuel.

And like rental vehicles...you will pay through every bodily orifice for the auto insurance, unless you want a STIFF bill at the end for "damages to the vehicle"

Dont you want to be happy because you own nothing?

The irony there is that I'd say it's more reasonable to happen in a car than in a printer. If the car has way to decide that it's brakes are near inoperable, or that a tire is so flat it's undriveable, then temporarily bricking the car could save lives. But if the little ink sponge in the Epson is full? No one gets hurt, maybe some ink spills. Far less reasonable to brick.

There may be more comments in this discussion. Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to turn on Classic Discussion System in your preferences instead.

The 'Switchblade' Flying Car is Ready for Takeoff

Why Neil Gaiman Finally Allowed 'The Sandman' to be Adapted for Netflix

... when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor. -- Fred Brooks

Wholeheartedly For The New And Old Customers

Top-Ranking Supplier

11 Years Of Industry Experience

Epson Programs Some Printers To Stop Operating, Claiming Danger of 'Ink Spills' - Slashdot

Featured Products

News & Blog

A surprising way to donate to charity with your empty printer cartridges – Which? News

New Generation of Epson EcoTank Solutions Help Families and Professionals Achieve Premium Quality Printing at an Outstanding Value - Industry Analysts, Inc.

123inkjets: Unbelievable Black Friday Deals on Compatible Ink and Toner

Does Color Management Really Matter? See your images exactly the way you intended them.

Best copy machine: Photocopiers that are worth the cost | Popular Science

Epson Expands EcoTank Cartridge-Free Supertank Portfolio with New Six-Color Photo Printer Series and Expansion of Pro Printers for SMBs

West L.A. Man Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison for Running Massive Telemarketing Scheme that Targeted Businesses and Charities | USAO-CDCA | Department of Justice

Printer Ink Black Friday Deals (2021): HP, Canon & More Printer Ink Deals Compared by Saver Trends | Business Wire

Empowering the Art of Going Green - Industry Analysts, Inc.

Toshiba Commemorates Earth Day Through Yearlong Recycling & Reforesting | Business Wire