It this possibly true? Their cartridge prices have always been borderline abusive. This would be beyond the pale if true.
H-P sued over printer cartridge expiration. Woman claims programming, not ink level, determines life
How does the printer know what day it is?
Why should they go to that trouble when all they need to do is put in less ink, if they don’t care about the competition?
I couldn’t comment on the primary technical assertion of her case, but I’ve been using various HP plotters for many years and I’ve never encountered anything that made me suspect her cause is true.
On the big plotters, both the 650c and the 750c, I’ve often had yellow cartridges tell me they were done when they really were not. There’s something about that particular coloe of ink that causes it to kinda congeal on the print head. Wipe the faux empty down with a paper towel and you’re back in business.
Oh, wait, sorry-
After I put my tinfoil hat on, and therefore…
Blocked the CIA Mindcontrol Rays©
and I see the problem!
I get around this issue by using my time machine, which is powered by my car, which uses a special carburetor that allows it to get 300mpg, and produce 475HP with a 440 hemi six pack engine in a 1973 Dodge Dart. The oil companies are on my trail though, and spy on me through the cable TV, and my microwave is trying to sterilize me, but I wear tinfoil undies, which are not only comfy and sexy, but also block the microwaves…
Oh, wait- the meds just kicked in. I’m off to Circle-K for a slushie, and some corn-nuts.
I wondered the same thing after I posted. She’s essentially claiming that the chip in the printer cartridge (which is where a lot of the technology of the printer is concentrated) “knows” the date.
I can only see three ways this could happen
1: A countdown timer in the cart chip at point of manufacture that starts running the day of assembly
2: A day/date chip and tiny power source built into the chip - same principle as # 1
3: The USB HP printer IO software can pick up the date from the OS and relay the date to the cartridge
4: The HP printer drivers can read the cartridge’s expiration date and refuse to print if today’s date is later than the expiration date.
I believe it. Some coworkers ran into this problem a few months ago - our HP printer stopped printing. A new cartridge fixed it. When we noticed there was an expiration date on the cartridges, the only mystery left was why it had been working before, since the expiration date was several months in the past.
Either the computer we use as a print server had the wrong date all along (unlikely, since it synchronizes its clock at every reboot), or the drivers allow a grace period before they clam up.
IIRC, the expiration date is printed right on the cartridge. I don’t want to pull the cartridges out of our printer (HP 2000C) right now to check, though.
You can also see each cartridge’s expiration date by clicking “Ink Cartridge Information” on the Printer Status page of the HP 2000C Toolbox. Looks like one of ours expires in 3/09, another in 6/08, and the other two are “unknown”.
You forgot option 3. The drivers don’t read the use by date and stop printing after that date, your cartridge happened to break somewhere and a new cartidge fixed the problem.
Quite possible, but IIRC, it wasn’t just one cartridge. And on the HP 2000C, the print heads are not built into the ink cartridges.
If the rate of chemical deterioration of a digital media could be controlled precisely enough, you could cause a print cartridge to expire on a certain date without actually being date-aware in the digital sense.
I recall a few years back when a demo of a Bond movie was released to critics early, and it was burned onto a DVD that chemically deteriorated to an unplayable state within 24 hours. Google tells me that it’s called Flexplay technology.
http://www.flexplay.com/news_news_economist.htm
That doesn’t mean HP is doing it, but it does mean people should dial back a notch on the “tinfoil hattery” mocking.
Questionable…I have been using the same print cartridges in my HP at home for close to 2 years now. I print about once a month.
-Tcat
One of our HP 2000s refused to print with an error message “Cartridge date has expired”.
If this is true, which I doubt, it must be a new thing. I’ve been using HP cartridges for several HP printers – two 4000TNs, a 4000N, and two others I can’t remember the model numbers of, for 6 years. I keep a detailed log of every time the cartridge is changed. There has been no appreciable difference in how long any cartridge lasts. Sometimes we have them for a year before we use them. At one point, we had six or seven on hand, which took well over 2 years to use up. There was never any issue with their expiring at some certain date, and they all worked fine even though they’d been sitting there for a long time.
I think yours are are laser printers toner carts. The printer carts being discussed are being “timed out” are (I believe) exclusively inkjets.
I know for a fact that HP2000C printers used time-based expiration on their cartridges. We had one, and it would stop printing once the cartridge was past the expiration date. There was a hack to get around this. It had something to do with changing some communication attribute of the parallel port. Maybe disabling bi-di? I can’t remember exactly. But somehow you could prevent the printer from telling the driver what the expiration date. If you did that, then the cartridge would print until it was empty even if was past the date.
There were postings in the HP forums about this issue. According to the HP support people, it was like that so that the customer would not damage their printer by using ink past the expiration date. They said that the ink could get gummy and jam the print heads. As you might expect, most of the customers didn’t like this policy.
I apologize of others have posted this. I only skimmed and saw a lot of speculation with little cited fact.
In hacker circles [though the media sloppily used “hacker” as a derogatory term for “computer cracker”, it is actually a positive term meaning someone who seeks elegant solutions through a depper understanding of the systems around them], this assertion has been well-known for years.
It wasn’t a crackpot theory. Hanckers had developed workarounds which allowed the “expired” cartridges to run happily to the end of their ink, and through several subsequent refills. PC Buyer’s Guide did a test in 2001 that confirmed that putting tape over a single pin on the cartridge disabled the expiration “feature”. [This is not my preferred method, because the thickness of the tape can keep the other contacts from seating properly, and may reduce quality slightly. I remove the contact entirely, and have had no problems. YMMV]
In 2001, not all cartridges used this method of expiration, but the list has increased steadily. I don’t know if all models of printer or cartridge use the exact same technique, but I’m sure you can Google up the right method for your own HP printer/cartridge combo.
Other printer makers have long used chips -openly- to prevent you from being able to use third party ink (and sued makers of third party cartridges who circumvented their “protections”). I’ve also had Panasonic laser printers where a tab limited you to half the number of pages that the cartridge could otherwise print. Since many of us refilled our cartridges anyway, masking the tab didn’t save us money, but did double the time between refills] I got 5-10 refills per cartridge [a total of about $20 in toner) before the print drum in the cartridge assembly wore out
My secretary thought it was “sleazy” for a doctor to do this, but I saved $50 ($100 for some laser cartridges) for 5 minutes work. Sadly, I don’t make $600-1000/hr.
We have had an identical situation here. We have a HP2500C and have had several cartridges “expire” on us and force us to throw them away, even with 90% of the ink unused.
Complete and total scam in my book!
You’re right, all mine are laser printers.
To get back to the OP, annoying as it might be, I don’t see how it’s actually illegal for HP to do this, and what damages can be claimed. The cartridges are clearly printed with expiration dates, and their documentation probably clearly states that you aren’t to use expired cartridges. They can probably make a case that the ink degrades over time, therefore you shouldn’t use old ink, because it will damage the printer. From there, it is a small step to justifying the timeout mechanism as a sensible precautionary measure. Even if they are just being greedheads, and trying to assure more ink sales, I’m not sure the mechanism can be construed as a failure to make their products work as advertised - the cartridge DOES have a published expiration date, and comes with no claims to operate after that date.
It seems that most of the printer manufacturers are getting fairly inventive concerning ink cartridges. Apparently, some models of Epson color printers refuse to print in black and white if the color cartridge is empty, even with a full black ink cartridge, and printer options set to “black and white”.