8 ms·

I bought extra HP cartridges off of Amazon years ago for my business so we would have extras. Imagine my surprise when, after installing the cartridges about a

I bought extra HP cartridges off of Amazon years ago for my business so we would have extras. Imagine my surprise when, after installing the cartridges about a year later, I learned they were the wrong “region”. Turns out HP region locks ink like they are Blu-Rays or Nintendo games! I had no idea I was buying “out-of-region” ink cartridges and I also had no idea such a thing could possibly matter. I called HP and the tech support person had the gall to tell me they have different ink for different regions because the climates are different. I nearly swallowed my teeth at the stupidity of such a claim. They offered nothing until I started telling my story on Twitter, and suddenly a Support person messaged me on Twitter offering free replacements. So not only do they have an indefensible strategy of region-locking ink cartridges, they also train you to whine as loudly as possible to get any sort of recourse. The entire printer industry appears to be running one scam or another.

wodenokoto 5y ago
Even Nintendo has stopped region locking games
imglorp 5y ago
The book industry did this too, years ago. They would sell normal books in the West but cheaper versions, with lighter weight paper etc, in Eastern countries. There's no lock of course, but before the internet it was harder to buy a cheap copy of Knuth from India if you lived in US. The point is, ink extortion seems to thrive on pricing tiers for different markets, just like content extortion does.
- sofixa 5y ago
  In France many books come in a default format which is a massive waste of space - big size, the paper is very thick, the font is pretty big, and there's a lot of whitespace on each page. And some books get a "pocket edition" which doesn't do any of those. If it were just the font it could be explained by targeting/adapting to people with poor vision, but the rest makes no sense besides to waste paper.
  - dtgriscom 5y ago
    Wasting paper doesn't seem like a likely goal for a business. Could this format be designed to satisfy some local expectations as to the look and feel of a "quality" book?
    - dpark 5y ago
      No, no. It must be the intentional paper wasting because corporations are intrinsically evil, and so will choose evil solutions even if they are not profitable.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        I mean, corporations are intrinsically evil because they will choose evil solutions if they're also profitable.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
    As someone who vision is not getting better, the bigger font with more whitespace sound good to me! I prefer paper books over e-readers, but many print book have fonts that too small whereas e-readers are adjustable.
  - jlengrand 5y ago
    that, and the fact that the default versions look much better on a shelf and at home than the pocket editions :).
  - tcbawo 5y ago
    They like to justify a $10 difference in price with $1 more worth of raw materials. It's like when you go to an Italian restaurant and order a plate of pasta for $17, but are happy with the value because you get so much.
  - hk__2 5y ago
    > And some books get a "pocket edition" which doesn't do any of those. It’s not "some" books get one and others get the other. All books get out in a first format decided by the publisher. There’s no "default" format; it can be big or small depending on the author/publisher’s choice. Then, later, you have reprints, which are often (but not always) in a cheaper format, the one we call "livre de poche" and which sells for less money. But this reduced price has little to do with the format; paper doesn’t account much in what you pay for a book. When you do reprints you have reduced costs everywhere because the text is already there: no need for a translator, reviewers, etc; also, there’s no marketing and the author’s fees are usually lower. In fact, in Italy, reprints are cheaper even if they are usually printed in the same format as the first edition.
- dogma1138 5y ago
  Video games are the same there are regions with far lower prices for new titles like Latin America, Russia and some parts of Asia. A lot of the keys sold on various sites come from those regions, some companies iirc Ubisoft started implementing region locks. Region locks on DVDs other than due to issues of distribution rights especially for dubbing and subtitles followed the same logic especially in Russia where region locked DVDs were released much earlier and for much cheaper as piracy was far more common there than in the west.
- luma 5y ago
  Wiley also attempted to make importing those foreign versions illegal, because of course they did. It eventually took the US Supreme Court to intervene on behalf of common sense.
  - scapp 5y ago
    In case anyone's curious, the SCOTUS case was Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kirtsaeng-v-john-wiley-sons-inc/ https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kirtsaeng-v-john...
- xeromal 5y ago
  In college, the international book was always disallowed and most of the time, the chapters and pages were just jumbled up. Nothing more.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    The professor might benefit financially from the sale of the book, e.g. if they're the author. It's quite common, really.
    - xeromal 5y ago
      Yeah, I had to buy one or two really shitty homemade-looking books the prof wrote. On the other side, I had professors that wrote their own curriculum and did their best to enjoy we didn't waste money on unnecessary books.
  - tdeck 5y ago
    My experience was different. I bought them in college whenever possible and none of the professors cared. Often they were exactly the same content, although sometimes the questions differed. Probably varies by institution.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  I have the Indian edition of Sedra and Smith, the difference being greyscale rather than black/white/blue images and rather worse paper. And a dire warning about where the book may be sold.
tzs 5y ago
> the tech support person had the gall to tell me they have different ink for different regions because the climates are different. I nearly swallowed my teeth at the stupidity of such a claim. Can you explain why it is a stupid claim? High humidity is known to affect things such as ink drying time which can affect print quality, so it isn't immediately obvious to me that it would be stupid to have different ink formulations for different climates. Edit: note that I'm not saying that HP was telling the truth. I just wanted to know how the very idea that of different inks for different climates is apparently stupid. Yes, in most places the humidity varies a good amount. But there are regions where it tends to be high most of the time, and regions where it tends to be low most of the time. It doesn't seem inherently absurd that an ink company might have say low, high, and regular humidity ink formulations designed for areas that are persistently low, persistently high, or neither. You might expect this to be pointless because humidity often swings a fair amount each day, but that the way humidity affects printing is by changing the moisture of the paper. A place where humidity swings from low to high and back on something like a daily cycle is likely to have much smaller swings in paper moisture content. The paper will remain closer to the some sort of weighted average of past humidity.
- mcphage 5y ago
  They might have different formulations, but they don’t have any justification for preventing ink from one area from even being usable in another.
- calciphus 5y ago
  Regions like "Americas", "Western Europe", etc often have far more variance within them than is worth accounting for in a printer ink formulation. I can travel within just the state of California and have more humidity variance than could possibly justify region locked printer ink. It's for price localization - sell at what the market will bear, and different regions have different price points.
- jevoten 5y ago
  A quick search reveals Europe and the US are coded as different HP printer regions, despite having overlapping humidity profiles, and the humidity difference between Louisiana and Alaska is far greater than between New York and London. It is clearly a bald faced lie, coming from the least trustworthy source. If they told me water was wet, I'd double-check.
mattkevan 5y ago
I discovered this when the HP printer I’d just bought from a major UK retailer refused to accept official HP ink cartridges. Turned out that the starter cartridges that came with it were US region coded and the printer was now permanently locked to US ink. Hated that thing with a passion - the crunch it made hitting the bottom of the e-waste bin when it finally broke was deeply satisfying. I’ll never purchase an HP product ever again.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Why not return it, that's clearly not fit for purpose and so contravenes the Consumer Rights Act, UK. Some retailers care that the products they're selling are conning people; especially if it results in returns.
xahrepap 5y ago
I bought an HP Color Laser printer a few years ago to avoid the Ink Jet nonsense. Turns out it’s not Ink Jet, it’s HP. Lessons learned. The printer worked flawlessly until I went through my first toner cartridges (the carts shipped with the printer are intentionally smaller so you have to replace them) I noticed the 3rd party replacements were $80 for a full set whereas 1st party were $200. I got the 3rd party. It’s been such a headache ever since. The MAJORITY of prints from my iMac fail. Google suggests the Mac drivers have a bug that cause OOM errors on the printer. Funny thing is it always succeeds from Windows or Linux. So I half bought it, and just put up with it. Fast forward a few years (a week or two ago) and my wife points out that there was an HP update and the printer works perfectly! Yay! The color cartridge is basically empty and needs replacing. Worked perfectly for a week until the printer popped up an error message “non-hp chip”. All speculation and anecdotal, but I just can’t help but feel like they’ve ended their charade and are actually being “honest” with me now…
- mcv 5y ago
  HP is just awful. I will never buy from them. I bought a Samsung laser printer assuming they were less awful, but now support for Samsung printers is handled by HP. My next printer is going to be Brother; that seems to be the only honest printer manufacturer out there.
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    I’ve replaced the mix of HPs and Canons in my house and office with Brothers. They’re like, oh, you made your own toner with crayon and coffee grounds? Ok, I can work with that.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Yeah +1 for Brother. Either they just permit third party cartridges or their protection is so minimal everyone can bypass it. Cheap toner cartridges work perfectly for me. Only issue is that the printers themselves are really hard to get now. In particular the colour lasers. If I find them it's at a crazy price. So I bought a b/w again. Must be the supply chain thing. PS the old one was not even broken after 10 years but I got sick of not having network printing :)
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
That's why nobody I know is buying HP, only Brother.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
oneoff786 5y ago
Very few nintendo games are region locked anymore.
fy20 5y ago
This is the same for professional printers too. A friend of mine has a side business printing signs and has a large format Epson (I think?) printer. It takes something like 12 inks and has options for chrome and other niche colours. During 2020 there was a shortage in my country of inks, no local suppliers - official or unofficial - had any. He found some on eBay from another EU country, but when they arrived the printer wouldn't accept them. Apparently the inks are region locked, and the only way around it would be replacing the main board of the printer to change it to the other region.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
The only reason they do help you on Twitter is because they're afraid of the visibility to other customers. It does help to complain there, I've done it to for effect too. It's the only reason I still have a Twitter account :)
6510 5y ago
I was surprised that the hp printer tool offered a subscription for ink based on usage that is much cheaper than my usual ink shops. I guess the formula of "the cheaper the printer the more expensive the ink" was financially less attractive than the subscription. The previous hp printer refused to accept new ink. The significant other threw out the empty cartridge needed to bring the cursed thing back to its senses. It hilariously still prints out the test page flawlessly with the new ink.

wodenokoto 5y ago

Even Nintendo has stopped region locking games

imglorp 5y ago

The book industry did this too, years ago. They would sell normal books in the West but cheaper versions, with lighter weight paper etc, in Eastern countries. There's no lock of course, but before the internet it was harder to buy a cheap copy of Knuth from India if you lived in US. The point is, ink extortion seems to thrive on pricing tiers for different markets, just like content extortion does.

sofixa 5y ago
In France many books come in a default format which is a massive waste of space - big size, the paper is very thick, the font is pretty big, and there's a lot of whitespace on each page. And some books get a "pocket edition" which doesn't do any of those. If it were just the font it could be explained by targeting/adapting to people with poor vision, but the rest makes no sense besides to waste paper.
- dtgriscom 5y ago
  Wasting paper doesn't seem like a likely goal for a business. Could this format be designed to satisfy some local expectations as to the look and feel of a "quality" book?
  - dpark 5y ago
    No, no. It must be the intentional paper wasting because corporations are intrinsically evil, and so will choose evil solutions even if they are not profitable.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      I mean, corporations are intrinsically evil because they will choose evil solutions if they're also profitable.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
  As someone who vision is not getting better, the bigger font with more whitespace sound good to me! I prefer paper books over e-readers, but many print book have fonts that too small whereas e-readers are adjustable.
- jlengrand 5y ago
  that, and the fact that the default versions look much better on a shelf and at home than the pocket editions :).
- tcbawo 5y ago
  They like to justify a $10 difference in price with $1 more worth of raw materials. It's like when you go to an Italian restaurant and order a plate of pasta for $17, but are happy with the value because you get so much.
- hk__2 5y ago
  > And some books get a "pocket edition" which doesn't do any of those. It’s not "some" books get one and others get the other. All books get out in a first format decided by the publisher. There’s no "default" format; it can be big or small depending on the author/publisher’s choice. Then, later, you have reprints, which are often (but not always) in a cheaper format, the one we call "livre de poche" and which sells for less money. But this reduced price has little to do with the format; paper doesn’t account much in what you pay for a book. When you do reprints you have reduced costs everywhere because the text is already there: no need for a translator, reviewers, etc; also, there’s no marketing and the author’s fees are usually lower. In fact, in Italy, reprints are cheaper even if they are usually printed in the same format as the first edition.
dogma1138 5y ago
Video games are the same there are regions with far lower prices for new titles like Latin America, Russia and some parts of Asia. A lot of the keys sold on various sites come from those regions, some companies iirc Ubisoft started implementing region locks. Region locks on DVDs other than due to issues of distribution rights especially for dubbing and subtitles followed the same logic especially in Russia where region locked DVDs were released much earlier and for much cheaper as piracy was far more common there than in the west.
luma 5y ago
Wiley also attempted to make importing those foreign versions illegal, because of course they did. It eventually took the US Supreme Court to intervene on behalf of common sense.
- scapp 5y ago
  In case anyone's curious, the SCOTUS case was Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kirtsaeng-v-john-wiley-sons-inc/ https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kirtsaeng-v-john...
xeromal 5y ago
In college, the international book was always disallowed and most of the time, the chapters and pages were just jumbled up. Nothing more.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  The professor might benefit financially from the sale of the book, e.g. if they're the author. It's quite common, really.
  - xeromal 5y ago
    Yeah, I had to buy one or two really shitty homemade-looking books the prof wrote. On the other side, I had professors that wrote their own curriculum and did their best to enjoy we didn't waste money on unnecessary books.
- tdeck 5y ago
  My experience was different. I bought them in college whenever possible and none of the professors cared. Often they were exactly the same content, although sometimes the questions differed. Probably varies by institution.
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
I have the Indian edition of Sedra and Smith, the difference being greyscale rather than black/white/blue images and rather worse paper. And a dire warning about where the book may be sold.

tzs 5y ago

> the tech support person had the gall to tell me they have different ink for different regions because the climates are different. I nearly swallowed my teeth at the stupidity of such a claim. Can you explain why it is a stupid claim? High humidity is known to affect things such as ink drying time which can affect print quality, so it isn't immediately obvious to me that it would be stupid to have different ink formulations for different climates. Edit: note that I'm not saying that HP was telling the truth. I just wanted to know how the very idea that of different inks for different climates is apparently stupid. Yes, in most places the humidity varies a good amount. But there are regions where it tends to be high most of the time, and regions where it tends to be low most of the time. It doesn't seem inherently absurd that an ink company might have say low, high, and regular humidity ink formulations designed for areas that are persistently low, persistently high, or neither. You might expect this to be pointless because humidity often swings a fair amount each day, but that the way humidity affects printing is by changing the moisture of the paper. A place where humidity swings from low to high and back on something like a daily cycle is likely to have much smaller swings in paper moisture content. The paper will remain closer to the some sort of weighted average of past humidity.

mcphage 5y ago
They might have different formulations, but they don’t have any justification for preventing ink from one area from even being usable in another.
calciphus 5y ago
Regions like "Americas", "Western Europe", etc often have far more variance within them than is worth accounting for in a printer ink formulation. I can travel within just the state of California and have more humidity variance than could possibly justify region locked printer ink. It's for price localization - sell at what the market will bear, and different regions have different price points.
jevoten 5y ago
A quick search reveals Europe and the US are coded as different HP printer regions, despite having overlapping humidity profiles, and the humidity difference between Louisiana and Alaska is far greater than between New York and London. It is clearly a bald faced lie, coming from the least trustworthy source. If they told me water was wet, I'd double-check.

mattkevan 5y ago

I discovered this when the HP printer I’d just bought from a major UK retailer refused to accept official HP ink cartridges. Turned out that the starter cartridges that came with it were US region coded and the printer was now permanently locked to US ink. Hated that thing with a passion - the crunch it made hitting the bottom of the e-waste bin when it finally broke was deeply satisfying. I’ll never purchase an HP product ever again.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
Why not return it, that's clearly not fit for purpose and so contravenes the Consumer Rights Act, UK. Some retailers care that the products they're selling are conning people; especially if it results in returns.

xahrepap 5y ago

I bought an HP Color Laser printer a few years ago to avoid the Ink Jet nonsense. Turns out it’s not Ink Jet, it’s HP. Lessons learned. The printer worked flawlessly until I went through my first toner cartridges (the carts shipped with the printer are intentionally smaller so you have to replace them) I noticed the 3rd party replacements were $80 for a full set whereas 1st party were $200. I got the 3rd party. It’s been such a headache ever since. The MAJORITY of prints from my iMac fail. Google suggests the Mac drivers have a bug that cause OOM errors on the printer. Funny thing is it always succeeds from Windows or Linux. So I half bought it, and just put up with it. Fast forward a few years (a week or two ago) and my wife points out that there was an HP update and the printer works perfectly! Yay! The color cartridge is basically empty and needs replacing. Worked perfectly for a week until the printer popped up an error message “non-hp chip”. All speculation and anecdotal, but I just can’t help but feel like they’ve ended their charade and are actually being “honest” with me now…

mcv 5y ago
HP is just awful. I will never buy from them. I bought a Samsung laser printer assuming they were less awful, but now support for Samsung printers is handled by HP. My next printer is going to be Brother; that seems to be the only honest printer manufacturer out there.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  I’ve replaced the mix of HPs and Canons in my house and office with Brothers. They’re like, oh, you made your own toner with crayon and coffee grounds? Ok, I can work with that.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Yeah +1 for Brother. Either they just permit third party cartridges or their protection is so minimal everyone can bypass it. Cheap toner cartridges work perfectly for me. Only issue is that the printers themselves are really hard to get now. In particular the colour lasers. If I find them it's at a crazy price. So I bought a b/w again. Must be the supply chain thing. PS the old one was not even broken after 10 years but I got sick of not having network printing :)

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

That's why nobody I know is buying HP, only Brother.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

oneoff786 5y ago

Very few nintendo games are region locked anymore.

fy20 5y ago

This is the same for professional printers too. A friend of mine has a side business printing signs and has a large format Epson (I think?) printer. It takes something like 12 inks and has options for chrome and other niche colours. During 2020 there was a shortage in my country of inks, no local suppliers - official or unofficial - had any. He found some on eBay from another EU country, but when they arrived the printer wouldn't accept them. Apparently the inks are region locked, and the only way around it would be replacing the main board of the printer to change it to the other region.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

The only reason they do help you on Twitter is because they're afraid of the visibility to other customers. It does help to complain there, I've done it to for effect too. It's the only reason I still have a Twitter account :)

6510 5y ago

I was surprised that the hp printer tool offered a subscription for ink based on usage that is much cheaper than my usual ink shops. I guess the formula of "the cheaper the printer the more expensive the ink" was financially less attractive than the subscription. The previous hp printer refused to accept new ink. The significant other threw out the empty cartridge needed to bring the cursed thing back to its senses. It hilariously still prints out the test page flawlessly with the new ink.