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Everything is designed to fail, the only questions are when and how. These printers are designed to stop working before the absorbent pad is full/used up. My gu

by nickff 4y ago

Everything is designed to fail, the only questions are when and how. These printers are designed to stop working before the absorbent pad is full/used up. My guess is that most of these printers are thrown away long before the 'soft-failure' is triggered.

skyyler 4y ago
I reject your notion that everything is designed to fail. I regularly use machines that are older than you are. They certainly were not designed to fail. The waste pad on every professional grade inkjet printer I've ever seen is a snap-fit part that costs under $25. But no, defend this practice of throwing away a printer because a sponge is saturated.
- nickff 4y ago
  I work in an electronics OEM, and I can tell you that all our products have a variety of age-related failure modes. We design them to last a long time, but not forever. LEDs age, as do capacitors, transistors, and batteries. Electro-mechanical systems are even worse!
  - tiagod 4y ago
    So you're not designing them to fail, your designing them to last at least X years/uses (but it can last more in theory). In this case, the printers are literally designed to fail. Once you get to an arbitrary number of uses, you can no longer use them, independently of the device state.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    That's very different from intentionally adding an undisclosed 'retirement date' to the firmware.
  - skyyler 4y ago
    Designing around potential failures is almost the opposite of what Epson did here...
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Assuming a replaceable waste pad is around $25. What fraction of a $50 printer is that? Canon TS302 Wireless Inkjet Printer https://a.co/d/3SjlJbB https://a.co/d/3SjlJbB (not Epson, but cheap inkjet; there were a handful of Epsons under $100). I solved this problem for our house in the sensible way: with a color HP3600N laser and a B&W multi-function HP (I think a 252), but there’s clearly a cost to make a part user-serviceable that doesn’t strictly have to be and if you’re trying to sell a printer in the $50-90 range, $5 of parts matters.

by nickff 4y ago

skyyler 4y ago

I reject your notion that everything is designed to fail. I regularly use machines that are older than you are. They certainly were not designed to fail. The waste pad on every professional grade inkjet printer I've ever seen is a snap-fit part that costs under $25. But no, defend this practice of throwing away a printer because a sponge is saturated.

nickff 4y ago
I work in an electronics OEM, and I can tell you that all our products have a variety of age-related failure modes. We design them to last a long time, but not forever. LEDs age, as do capacitors, transistors, and batteries. Electro-mechanical systems are even worse!
- tiagod 4y ago
  So you're not designing them to fail, your designing them to last at least X years/uses (but it can last more in theory). In this case, the printers are literally designed to fail. Once you get to an arbitrary number of uses, you can no longer use them, independently of the device state.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  That's very different from intentionally adding an undisclosed 'retirement date' to the firmware.
- skyyler 4y ago
  Designing around potential failures is almost the opposite of what Epson did here...
sokoloff 4y ago
Assuming a replaceable waste pad is around $25. What fraction of a $50 printer is that? Canon TS302 Wireless Inkjet Printer https://a.co/d/3SjlJbB https://a.co/d/3SjlJbB (not Epson, but cheap inkjet; there were a handful of Epsons under $100). I solved this problem for our house in the sensible way: with a color HP3600N laser and a B&W multi-function HP (I think a 252), but there’s clearly a cost to make a part user-serviceable that doesn’t strictly have to be and if you’re trying to sell a printer in the $50-90 range, $5 of parts matters.