32 ms·

Forced to sell chipless ink cartridges, Canon tells customers how to bypass DRM

374 points by ryzvonusef 5y ago

ryzvonusef 5y ago
> Printer ink company Canon was forced by the silicon shortage to sell cartridges without the DRM chips used to dissuade customers from using third-party tanks. Accordingly, it is reportedly telling customers how to bypass its "genuine" ink bullshit. (translation)
02020202 5y ago
i hate vendor lock-in. hence, i will never buy apple products or anything like this.
Hamuko 5y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850987
perlgeek 5y ago
> The instructions appear to be straightforward—for the models I checked all you have to do is ignore onerous error messages Nothing to see here, move along...
- Normille 5y ago
  Exactly. As per my longer rantlet elsewhere in these comments. It's total bollox. My Canon printer won't print if it doesn't recognise an ink cartridge as being kosher. End of story. The only error message you can ignore and still continue to print is the one about 'ink may have run out'.
enonevets 5y ago
Switched to a Brothers printer well over a decade ago that uses toner instead of ink and couldn’t be happier.
- hughrr 5y ago
  I use HP toner and expense it :)
- egberts1 5y ago
  Brothers, and never looked back after 15 years.
  - TacticalCoder 5y ago
    Same. B&W laser Brother MFC-7320 here since I don't know how many years. Once in a while a new toner and the thing keeps happily cranking.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  yeah and they have decent Linux support too.
  - phoronixrly 5y ago
    I don't think shipping a binary CUPS filter you're just supposed to trust counts as good Linux support. Never buying a printer without a fully working PPD without blob dependencies.
    - mshook 5y ago
      So what kind of printer do you buy then?
      - syshum 5y ago
        I have been printer free / paperless for over a decade now. I am not sure why printers are even needed anymore
        wyclif 5y ago
        What if you need to print pamphlets, booklets, or place cards? What about your academic thesis?
trollied 5y ago
The responsible thing to do is issue new software that doesn’t complain in the first place & any needed firmware updates for the printers.
YPPH 5y ago
As I understand it, or at least as the narrative goes, printer manufacturers subsidise the cost of the printer by expecting people will buy genuine cartridges. It brings down the RRP of the printer, thereby making it look more competitive than it really is. It is a risk that users might not buy your cartridges. That is a risk these manufacturers accept when they sell their product below market value. Loading up your printer with DRM is having your cake and eating it. It is anti-competitive and ought be outlawed. Either sell the unit at the real price you want to get from it, or accept the risk that your get rich scheme might not work.
- quijoteuniv 5y ago
  As far as i understand Canon is selling non genuine cartridges :)
- cute_boi 5y ago
  Same with smart tv, phones etc. They all try to subsidize costs by using ads and only gadfly like us grouse over it. Many people simply accept it and moves on. Also, many people aren't complaining and the competition is fierce. Many user aren't technical enough to find the skullduggery of such companies and at the end we all have to pay. Regarding outlaw I don't see it happening soon tbh. Politicians simply doesn't care about such issue.
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    I just install an ad blocker. Nobody is getting paid on my watch.
  - OmegaPG 5y ago
    We are subsidizing the product is also a lie by companies. They just want the recurring revenue by selling ads/cartridges etc.
    - boringg 5y ago
      Not a lie - its how the work the economics out. Lower the upfront cost of getting you on their product. The net present value of all the ink payments / subscription services is the value of the product. They probably have little to no margin on the actual printer purchase.
dark-star 5y ago
Why is this making the news? It's just a "click on OK if you really want to use this cartridge" Not really "bypassing" any "DRM" here, are we?
- mbarbar 5y ago
  Yeah the title is a bit unfortunate, but I think this is interesting news. As an aisde, it seems really wasteful to attach a semiconductor to a disposable/consumable item in the first place...
  - b112 5y ago
    It's OK. The cartridges are labeled as recyclable, which means (as with a lot of recyclable stuff) it just get sent to India or China by the boatload. Then someone digs through said random stuff, finds the cartridges, extracts the chips, sells them, feeds their family, and then after market Chinese clone makers use the legit chips to make knockoffs. So, outside of the cost of shipping this stuff all around the world, and that the recycling just ends up in the trash in another country, it all works out in the end. * edit.. I notice downvotes, but there have been endless news stories of how recycled trash is sorted, and often categorically sold to specialty companies to deal with. And, how said companies just ship that trash, by the boatload, to India or what not. And yes, how after usable parts are extracted, it just goes into a landfill. One big horror is how housing in Canada, has asbesto removed, which ends up going through this same process. A local recycling company just ships it all overseas, and youtube videos show people in India manually working with it, no masks, no protection gear. Recycling is good. Recycling without a 100% traceable path, is feel goodz, without follow through and is often worse than not even recycling.
    - nicce 5y ago
      Regardless of how well it is recycled, it is worse as putting these parts can be avoided totally. There is no real need for these chips. Just sell your printers in real price and don’t monetize with inks.
mbarbar 5y ago
Is there a reason consumer printers haven't been disrupted by some bored billionaire? Obviously some brands are better than others, but none stand out as a name everyone knows as a disrupting force (ala Uber, OnePlus, Tesla, etc; ignoring whether they are or not).
- Narkov 5y ago
  I would have thought it is a dying market. Sample size of one but I probably print 10 pages a year now.
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    There is certainly a market for cartridges that don't dry out it seems hah.
    - usrusr 5y ago
      Toner cartridges don't dry out. Back in the twentieth century, laser printing used to be the exclusive realm of high volume shared printers in offices, but that price cliff quickly disappeared in the twentyfirst. But somehow, the printing cartridge industry managed to keep the illusion of "I don't print enough to warrant a printing method that isn't plagued by drying it when not in use" alive even while offering laser printers for tens of dollars right next to them. Apparently the lure of pretty colors is that strong. I suspect that even people too young to be born when it was still true regularly fall for "I don't print enough to warrant a printing method that isn't plagued by drying it when not in use"
      - moffkalast 5y ago
        Well most of the time I print something myself it's some graphics thing that needs colours. Though yeah some people just print black and white text, even though that hardly makes sense anymore. If you need to get text somewhere just send a PDF. Maybe for signing contracts or something, but for that there's adobe acrobat reader. Colour lasers remain quite expensive and usually don't include the extra scanner which is handy to have at times. Though lasers do have the benefit of being able to print onto clear transparent sheets which inkjets straight up can't unless you get those special roughened ones.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
As a contrarian to some posts here: Have been using larger HP business laserjets privately and am quite happy, no issues over 15+ years each. Never owned an inkjet, switched from an Epson 24 LQ550 needle printer to a laserjet, never looked back.
- lithos 5y ago
  I have never seen anyone have good things to say about consumer grade printers. Even when recommending printers, it's a matter of arguing why something is less worse than the others. Printer's and copiers are probably older than computers (or at least civilian computers), and the industry as a whole has yet to find even something as a reasonable/useable/ergonomic user interface for their product. Literally a product type that has been around longer than most of their customers and users, and the manufacturers have yet to make a useable user interface. Even simple things like the cancel job button are unreliable/laggy/obnoxious to use or even find.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    I have a Laserjet M203DW and it's brilliant for documents and book blocks. I also have an Officejet 8610 which works well enough and, thanks to Instant Ink's per-page pricing model that doesn't cost any more no matter how much ink you use, makes a nice little more-or-less free photo printer - you end up just paying for the printer (which I got used anyway), the paper, and $3 a month for all the ink you can eat. There, now you've seen someone have good things to say about consumer grade printers. :) They really don't suck any more like they used to 10 or 20 or 30 years ago!
Normille 5y ago
This is such a shit clickbait article [in fact hardly even an article. A brief paragraph attached to a Canon press release]. "Canon tells customers how to bypass DRM" = "When your canon printer tells you the cartridge is empty, just ignore the warning and keep printing". Anyone who has a Canon printer knows this already. Bypassing the DRM would mean Canon providing you with a way to use unchipped cartirdges in their printers, which isn't happening, in spite of what the 'article' claims [or if it is happening, it's not covered at all]. When my lottery ticket comes up, I'm going to take great pleasure in smashing my Canon printer into a million pieces with a sledge-hammer. The 'ink has run out' messages don't bother me [as said above, just hit 'OK' and continue printing]. But what drives me insane is the fact that, if a dust mote lands on one of the cartridges, it can move it so very slightly that the printer no longer recognises it [presumably the chip contacts move out of alignment]. When I send a print job through, the printer then clanks, wheezes and groans for what seems like about 5 minutes, as if it's going to print, then makes an annoying Beep! Beep! Beep! and tells me one of the cartridges canot be recognised. I open the top of the printer, wait another aeon for the print head to clank into access position, reseat the offending cartridge and close the lid. Then wait another ice-age for it to clank and groan before... Beep! Beep! Beep! Now one of the other cartridges can't be recognised. Sometimes I have to play this game of 'Cartridge Whack-a-Mole' for about half an hour, before the bloody thing decides it will deign to print. And, even then, it'll often print the first page absolutely perfeclty but the second will come out looking as if someone's shoved a tonne of quick-drying cement up the print-head nozzles. Thus leading to running the head cleaning procedure which, in turn is likely to lead to more Beep! Beep! Beep!-ing, as cleaning the heads is almost guaranteed to either empty one of the cartridges, or knock it out of alignment again. So, forgive my ire about the vacuuous promises of the title of this submission. I dared to believe it was going to reveal an officially sanctioned 'hack' to allow me to lobotomise my Canon printer for once and for all. Incidentally, although my printer is a Canon and I loathe it with a passion, I don't think Canon's printers are any worse than any others. Printers just seem to be one area of computer technology that has never got any more reliable with the passing years. I used to work in a university Graphics department. We had some big A0 roll printers there which cost thousands of £££s. They were always going wrong too. As were the expensive colour laser printers and high end inkjets. Basically, printers are bastards sent to torment us.
throwanem 5y ago
The claim about Instant Ink DRM is narrowly accurate but disingenuously presented. The printer won't take Instant Ink cartridges if it's not enrolled in the program, that's true. But there aren't supposed to be Instant Ink carts floating around the aftermarket in the first place - when you sign up for that program, part of the deal is agreeing to ship the spent cartridges back to HP, in postage-paid packaging they provide along with each re-up. I think that's because of the print heads, which are oddly absent from every discussion of printer economics I've ever encountered. In my gallery-quality photo printer, the print head is a discrete component costing $350 to replace - 3.5x the price of a full OEM set of eight ink tanks. HP cartridges have integral heads, but I see no reason to think they cost meaningfully less per cm^2 to manufacture than the Canon head does. I think that's why the Instant Ink program prices purely on page count, and not at all by ink usage, which after all would seem to make more sense for an ink subscription. Shipping back the spent cartridges means, excepting wear and damage, HP can turn most of them around for reuse without having to manufacture new carts with expensive new heads. I think that's what they care about much more than the cost of the ink per se, and even the cost of the printer. The pricing model doesn't entirely make sense otherwise - if you print photos on an Instant Ink-subscribed device, you'll never hit the 100-page threshold for a price bump before you exhaust the carts and get a re-up. Their BAs have to know this is the case, and they could easily enough address it with a surcharge for relatively frequent re-ups, or just by charging for ink usage past a certain threshold. That all could happen on their end, driven by printer-reported usage data, but they don't, so I can print photos to my heart's content for the cost of paper and $3 a month for all the ink I can eat. (And have! Went through 3 cart sets in a month once, back before I got my Pixma.) If the subscription fee really is going to pay for the actual ink, that's an absurd amount of money to leave on the table, so I have to figure HP's upside is elsewhere, and the print heads seem like the likeliest place given how much they seem to cost to make. How come nobody in the "printers suck and printer ink is a scam" discourse ever seems to think about this? I'm just a yahoo with a camera, I can't possibly be the first to have thought about it...
DarylZero 5y ago
Funny how people are adopting the word "DRM" here even though printer cartridges have nothing to do with "digital rights". Of course there's no legal right to ink supply monopoly. And the ink being controlled is not even solid, let alone digital. It's merely a computerized lock on a physical item. The usage is much more appropriate to RMS's backronym "digital restrictions management".
- georgyo 5y ago
  That's why we should use the term CRAP instead of DRM Content Restriction Access Management would cover all content, including liquid ink. Though you can argue that "digital" in this case is referring to the chip and reader. These are infact digital components restricting access to liquid.
  - lobocinza 5y ago
    In this case it's CRAM and I don't think content covers cases concerning hardware like this. Maybe Consumer Restricted Access Pattern. In essence those are monopolistic and consumer hostile practices.
  - npteljes 5y ago
    I agree, and propose that an item having restrictions like this should be referred to as "loaded with CRAP".
  - npunt 5y ago
    I think you mean Content Restriction Access Protection (or Permission), as CRAM just doesn't have quite the ring to it :)
    - lurn_mor 5y ago
      They'll CRAM it down your throat whether you like it or not.
    - indymike 5y ago
      I can see the CRAM/CRAP bill advance it's way to the Senate floor. Would love to ask my local congressperson "What's your stance on CRAP?" and watch him try to say "I'm all for CRAP it's good for business, and if CRAM/CRAP is good for business, it's good for the little guy." If someone can get this done, I'm running for office on a NO CRAP platform.
TacoSteemers 5y ago
> for the models I checked all you have to do is ignore onerous error messages—so it seems incorrect to claim Canon blocks the use of third-party cartridges The ink level readout doesn't work due to a lack of chips. There is no DRM story here.
lobocinza 5y ago
> There is no negative impact on print quality when using consumables without electronic components... From a Canon statement quoted on the article.
- kergonath 5y ago
  Hopefully this will be held against them in a class action lawsuit when they re-chip their cartridges.
HPsquared 5y ago
There goes the business model!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Aardwolf 5y ago
> HP's ink DRM is clearly more despised—they not only block non-DRM ink, but the ink is region locked and they expect you to pay for and maintain a subscription to it. I'm uninformed about this. I have an HP laser printer that's around 5 years old, and while I'm sure the toners have DRM chips, they don't require a subscription. Also, the printer has already been saying for a year that "supplies are very low" but so far it kept printing fine (I don't need to use it that often) Just to know what to expect: is a subscription for ink required for all new HP printers now, or only some models? Because that kind of bullshittery is an immediate no-go for me, but the issue is I do quite like HP's interface (the UI on the printer itself) compared to some other brands... E.g. HP supports all PDFs from a USB stick, while another brand I know (that is quite an ethical brand otherwise) cannot parse almost half of all PDFs and when it cannot will actually print a piece of paper with the text "Unsupported PDF" on paper, which is also quite unacceptable to me (not supporting is already a problem, the paper waste is the cherry on top)
- nicce 5y ago
  For most new printers. Older ones have got a firmware update. https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/cv/instantink https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/cv/instantink
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  AFAIK the ink subscription is just an option, not a requirement. Sadly, our HP OfficeJet Pro can't print PDF's, and due to some weird driver state after uninstalling and subsequently re-installing it, printing is now impossible...
skarz 5y ago
Maybe there wouldn't be a global chip shortage if they didn't put them in products that don't need them.

374 points by ryzvonusef 5y ago

> Printer ink company Canon was forced by the silicon shortage to sell cartridges without the DRM chips used to dissuade customers from using third-party tanks. Accordingly, it is reportedly telling customers how to bypass its "genuine" ink bullshit. (translation)

02020202 5y ago

i hate vendor lock-in. hence, i will never buy apple products or anything like this.

Hamuko 5y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850987

perlgeek 5y ago

> The instructions appear to be straightforward—for the models I checked all you have to do is ignore onerous error messages Nothing to see here, move along...

Normille 5y ago
Exactly. As per my longer rantlet elsewhere in these comments. It's total bollox. My Canon printer won't print if it doesn't recognise an ink cartridge as being kosher. End of story. The only error message you can ignore and still continue to print is the one about 'ink may have run out'.

enonevets 5y ago

Switched to a Brothers printer well over a decade ago that uses toner instead of ink and couldn’t be happier.

hughrr 5y ago
I use HP toner and expense it :)
egberts1 5y ago
Brothers, and never looked back after 15 years.
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  Same. B&W laser Brother MFC-7320 here since I don't know how many years. Once in a while a new toner and the thing keeps happily cranking.
ekianjo 5y ago
yeah and they have decent Linux support too.
- phoronixrly 5y ago
  I don't think shipping a binary CUPS filter you're just supposed to trust counts as good Linux support. Never buying a printer without a fully working PPD without blob dependencies.
  - mshook 5y ago
    So what kind of printer do you buy then?
    - syshum 5y ago
      I have been printer free / paperless for over a decade now. I am not sure why printers are even needed anymore
      - wyclif 5y ago
        What if you need to print pamphlets, booklets, or place cards? What about your academic thesis?

trollied 5y ago

The responsible thing to do is issue new software that doesn’t complain in the first place & any needed firmware updates for the printers.

YPPH 5y ago

As I understand it, or at least as the narrative goes, printer manufacturers subsidise the cost of the printer by expecting people will buy genuine cartridges. It brings down the RRP of the printer, thereby making it look more competitive than it really is. It is a risk that users might not buy your cartridges. That is a risk these manufacturers accept when they sell their product below market value. Loading up your printer with DRM is having your cake and eating it. It is anti-competitive and ought be outlawed. Either sell the unit at the real price you want to get from it, or accept the risk that your get rich scheme might not work.

quijoteuniv 5y ago
As far as i understand Canon is selling non genuine cartridges :)
cute_boi 5y ago
Same with smart tv, phones etc. They all try to subsidize costs by using ads and only gadfly like us grouse over it. Many people simply accept it and moves on. Also, many people aren't complaining and the competition is fierce. Many user aren't technical enough to find the skullduggery of such companies and at the end we all have to pay. Regarding outlaw I don't see it happening soon tbh. Politicians simply doesn't care about such issue.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  I just install an ad blocker. Nobody is getting paid on my watch.
- OmegaPG 5y ago
  We are subsidizing the product is also a lie by companies. They just want the recurring revenue by selling ads/cartridges etc.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Not a lie - its how the work the economics out. Lower the upfront cost of getting you on their product. The net present value of all the ink payments / subscription services is the value of the product. They probably have little to no margin on the actual printer purchase.

dark-star 5y ago

Why is this making the news? It's just a "click on OK if you really want to use this cartridge" Not really "bypassing" any "DRM" here, are we?

mbarbar 5y ago
Yeah the title is a bit unfortunate, but I think this is interesting news. As an aisde, it seems really wasteful to attach a semiconductor to a disposable/consumable item in the first place...
- b112 5y ago
  It's OK. The cartridges are labeled as recyclable, which means (as with a lot of recyclable stuff) it just get sent to India or China by the boatload. Then someone digs through said random stuff, finds the cartridges, extracts the chips, sells them, feeds their family, and then after market Chinese clone makers use the legit chips to make knockoffs. So, outside of the cost of shipping this stuff all around the world, and that the recycling just ends up in the trash in another country, it all works out in the end. * edit.. I notice downvotes, but there have been endless news stories of how recycled trash is sorted, and often categorically sold to specialty companies to deal with. And, how said companies just ship that trash, by the boatload, to India or what not. And yes, how after usable parts are extracted, it just goes into a landfill. One big horror is how housing in Canada, has asbesto removed, which ends up going through this same process. A local recycling company just ships it all overseas, and youtube videos show people in India manually working with it, no masks, no protection gear. Recycling is good. Recycling without a 100% traceable path, is feel goodz, without follow through and is often worse than not even recycling.
  - nicce 5y ago
    Regardless of how well it is recycled, it is worse as putting these parts can be avoided totally. There is no real need for these chips. Just sell your printers in real price and don’t monetize with inks.

mbarbar 5y ago

Is there a reason consumer printers haven't been disrupted by some bored billionaire? Obviously some brands are better than others, but none stand out as a name everyone knows as a disrupting force (ala Uber, OnePlus, Tesla, etc; ignoring whether they are or not).

Narkov 5y ago
I would have thought it is a dying market. Sample size of one but I probably print 10 pages a year now.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  There is certainly a market for cartridges that don't dry out it seems hah.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Toner cartridges don't dry out. Back in the twentieth century, laser printing used to be the exclusive realm of high volume shared printers in offices, but that price cliff quickly disappeared in the twentyfirst. But somehow, the printing cartridge industry managed to keep the illusion of "I don't print enough to warrant a printing method that isn't plagued by drying it when not in use" alive even while offering laser printers for tens of dollars right next to them. Apparently the lure of pretty colors is that strong. I suspect that even people too young to be born when it was still true regularly fall for "I don't print enough to warrant a printing method that isn't plagued by drying it when not in use"
    - moffkalast 5y ago
      Well most of the time I print something myself it's some graphics thing that needs colours. Though yeah some people just print black and white text, even though that hardly makes sense anymore. If you need to get text somewhere just send a PDF. Maybe for signing contracts or something, but for that there's adobe acrobat reader. Colour lasers remain quite expensive and usually don't include the extra scanner which is handy to have at times. Though lasers do have the benefit of being able to print onto clear transparent sheets which inkjets straight up can't unless you get those special roughened ones.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

As a contrarian to some posts here: Have been using larger HP business laserjets privately and am quite happy, no issues over 15+ years each. Never owned an inkjet, switched from an Epson 24 LQ550 needle printer to a laserjet, never looked back.

lithos 5y ago
I have never seen anyone have good things to say about consumer grade printers. Even when recommending printers, it's a matter of arguing why something is less worse than the others. Printer's and copiers are probably older than computers (or at least civilian computers), and the industry as a whole has yet to find even something as a reasonable/useable/ergonomic user interface for their product. Literally a product type that has been around longer than most of their customers and users, and the manufacturers have yet to make a useable user interface. Even simple things like the cancel job button are unreliable/laggy/obnoxious to use or even find.
- throwanem 5y ago
  I have a Laserjet M203DW and it's brilliant for documents and book blocks. I also have an Officejet 8610 which works well enough and, thanks to Instant Ink's per-page pricing model that doesn't cost any more no matter how much ink you use, makes a nice little more-or-less free photo printer - you end up just paying for the printer (which I got used anyway), the paper, and $3 a month for all the ink you can eat. There, now you've seen someone have good things to say about consumer grade printers. :) They really don't suck any more like they used to 10 or 20 or 30 years ago!

Normille 5y ago

This is such a shit clickbait article [in fact hardly even an article. A brief paragraph attached to a Canon press release]. "Canon tells customers how to bypass DRM" = "When your canon printer tells you the cartridge is empty, just ignore the warning and keep printing". Anyone who has a Canon printer knows this already. Bypassing the DRM would mean Canon providing you with a way to use unchipped cartirdges in their printers, which isn't happening, in spite of what the 'article' claims [or if it is happening, it's not covered at all]. When my lottery ticket comes up, I'm going to take great pleasure in smashing my Canon printer into a million pieces with a sledge-hammer. The 'ink has run out' messages don't bother me [as said above, just hit 'OK' and continue printing]. But what drives me insane is the fact that, if a dust mote lands on one of the cartridges, it can move it so very slightly that the printer no longer recognises it [presumably the chip contacts move out of alignment]. When I send a print job through, the printer then clanks, wheezes and groans for what seems like about 5 minutes, as if it's going to print, then makes an annoying Beep! Beep! Beep! and tells me one of the cartridges canot be recognised. I open the top of the printer, wait another aeon for the print head to clank into access position, reseat the offending cartridge and close the lid. Then wait another ice-age for it to clank and groan before... Beep! Beep! Beep! Now one of the other cartridges can't be recognised. Sometimes I have to play this game of 'Cartridge Whack-a-Mole' for about half an hour, before the bloody thing decides it will deign to print. And, even then, it'll often print the first page absolutely perfeclty but the second will come out looking as if someone's shoved a tonne of quick-drying cement up the print-head nozzles. Thus leading to running the head cleaning procedure which, in turn is likely to lead to more Beep! Beep! Beep!-ing, as cleaning the heads is almost guaranteed to either empty one of the cartridges, or knock it out of alignment again. So, forgive my ire about the vacuuous promises of the title of this submission. I dared to believe it was going to reveal an officially sanctioned 'hack' to allow me to lobotomise my Canon printer for once and for all. Incidentally, although my printer is a Canon and I loathe it with a passion, I don't think Canon's printers are any worse than any others. Printers just seem to be one area of computer technology that has never got any more reliable with the passing years. I used to work in a university Graphics department. We had some big A0 roll printers there which cost thousands of £££s. They were always going wrong too. As were the expensive colour laser printers and high end inkjets. Basically, printers are bastards sent to torment us.

throwanem 5y ago

The claim about Instant Ink DRM is narrowly accurate but disingenuously presented. The printer won't take Instant Ink cartridges if it's not enrolled in the program, that's true. But there aren't supposed to be Instant Ink carts floating around the aftermarket in the first place - when you sign up for that program, part of the deal is agreeing to ship the spent cartridges back to HP, in postage-paid packaging they provide along with each re-up. I think that's because of the print heads, which are oddly absent from every discussion of printer economics I've ever encountered. In my gallery-quality photo printer, the print head is a discrete component costing $350 to replace - 3.5x the price of a full OEM set of eight ink tanks. HP cartridges have integral heads, but I see no reason to think they cost meaningfully less per cm^2 to manufacture than the Canon head does. I think that's why the Instant Ink program prices purely on page count, and not at all by ink usage, which after all would seem to make more sense for an ink subscription. Shipping back the spent cartridges means, excepting wear and damage, HP can turn most of them around for reuse without having to manufacture new carts with expensive new heads. I think that's what they care about much more than the cost of the ink per se, and even the cost of the printer. The pricing model doesn't entirely make sense otherwise - if you print photos on an Instant Ink-subscribed device, you'll never hit the 100-page threshold for a price bump before you exhaust the carts and get a re-up. Their BAs have to know this is the case, and they could easily enough address it with a surcharge for relatively frequent re-ups, or just by charging for ink usage past a certain threshold. That all could happen on their end, driven by printer-reported usage data, but they don't, so I can print photos to my heart's content for the cost of paper and $3 a month for all the ink I can eat. (And have! Went through 3 cart sets in a month once, back before I got my Pixma.) If the subscription fee really is going to pay for the actual ink, that's an absurd amount of money to leave on the table, so I have to figure HP's upside is elsewhere, and the print heads seem like the likeliest place given how much they seem to cost to make. How come nobody in the "printers suck and printer ink is a scam" discourse ever seems to think about this? I'm just a yahoo with a camera, I can't possibly be the first to have thought about it...

DarylZero 5y ago

Funny how people are adopting the word "DRM" here even though printer cartridges have nothing to do with "digital rights". Of course there's no legal right to ink supply monopoly. And the ink being controlled is not even solid, let alone digital. It's merely a computerized lock on a physical item. The usage is much more appropriate to RMS's backronym "digital restrictions management".

georgyo 5y ago
That's why we should use the term CRAP instead of DRM Content Restriction Access Management would cover all content, including liquid ink. Though you can argue that "digital" in this case is referring to the chip and reader. These are infact digital components restricting access to liquid.
- lobocinza 5y ago
  In this case it's CRAM and I don't think content covers cases concerning hardware like this. Maybe Consumer Restricted Access Pattern. In essence those are monopolistic and consumer hostile practices.
- npteljes 5y ago
  I agree, and propose that an item having restrictions like this should be referred to as "loaded with CRAP".
- npunt 5y ago
  I think you mean Content Restriction Access Protection (or Permission), as CRAM just doesn't have quite the ring to it :)
  - lurn_mor 5y ago
    They'll CRAM it down your throat whether you like it or not.
  - indymike 5y ago
    I can see the CRAM/CRAP bill advance it's way to the Senate floor. Would love to ask my local congressperson "What's your stance on CRAP?" and watch him try to say "I'm all for CRAP it's good for business, and if CRAM/CRAP is good for business, it's good for the little guy." If someone can get this done, I'm running for office on a NO CRAP platform.

TacoSteemers 5y ago

> for the models I checked all you have to do is ignore onerous error messages—so it seems incorrect to claim Canon blocks the use of third-party cartridges The ink level readout doesn't work due to a lack of chips. There is no DRM story here.

lobocinza 5y ago

> There is no negative impact on print quality when using consumables without electronic components... From a Canon statement quoted on the article.

kergonath 5y ago
Hopefully this will be held against them in a class action lawsuit when they re-chip their cartridges.

HPsquared 5y ago

There goes the business model!

deleted 5y ago

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Aardwolf 5y ago

> HP's ink DRM is clearly more despised—they not only block non-DRM ink, but the ink is region locked and they expect you to pay for and maintain a subscription to it. I'm uninformed about this. I have an HP laser printer that's around 5 years old, and while I'm sure the toners have DRM chips, they don't require a subscription. Also, the printer has already been saying for a year that "supplies are very low" but so far it kept printing fine (I don't need to use it that often) Just to know what to expect: is a subscription for ink required for all new HP printers now, or only some models? Because that kind of bullshittery is an immediate no-go for me, but the issue is I do quite like HP's interface (the UI on the printer itself) compared to some other brands... E.g. HP supports all PDFs from a USB stick, while another brand I know (that is quite an ethical brand otherwise) cannot parse almost half of all PDFs and when it cannot will actually print a piece of paper with the text "Unsupported PDF" on paper, which is also quite unacceptable to me (not supporting is already a problem, the paper waste is the cherry on top)

nicce 5y ago
For most new printers. Older ones have got a firmware update. https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/cv/instantink https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/cv/instantink
Tijdreiziger 5y ago
AFAIK the ink subscription is just an option, not a requirement. Sadly, our HP OfficeJet Pro can't print PDF's, and due to some weird driver state after uninstalling and subsequently re-installing it, printing is now impossible...

skarz 5y ago

Maybe there wouldn't be a global chip shortage if they didn't put them in products that don't need them.