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posted by cmn32480 on Monday September 19 2016, @11:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the time-bomb dept.

Martin Brinkmann at gHacks reports

HP released a firmware update on March 12, 2016 for several of the company's Officejet printers that renders non-HP ink cartridges useless.

HP customers began to complain about the issue on September 13, 2016 on various online forums, the official HP forum, and on community sites like Reddit.

All reported that a HP Officejet printer blocked non-HP ink cartridges from working, and that the device displayed one of the following messages to the user:

Cartridge Problem.

The following ink cartridges appears to be missing or [damaged].

Replace the ink cartridges to resume printing.

[Continues...]

Cartridge Problem.

Until cartridges are replaced, make sure the printer is turned on to avoid damage to the printer.

One or more cartridges are missing or damaged.

The ink cartridge listed above is an older generation ink cartridge that does not work in your printer. It can still be used with some older printer models.

If you do not own an older printer model and your ink cartridge is a genuine HP cartridge, contract HP support for more information.

It appears that HP programmed the firmware update that it released in March to block non-HP ink cartridges from working starting September 13, 2016.

[...] HP customers affected by the issue cannot do much about it it appears. The printer won't accept non-HP ink cartridges anymore unless they are specifically designed for the new firmware.

[...] HP customers who don't want to experience an issue like this again in the future may want to disable firmware updates for their printer.

[...] The easiest option to do so is to wait for the next HP Update prompt to appear.

  1. Select Settings on the prompt.
  2. On the HP Update Settings page, switch to Never under "Check for software updates on the web".

Also, whenever a HP Update prompt is displayed, select Cancel to block the download and installation of the update.

So, what's the complement of "delayed gratification"?


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  • (Score: 1) by fraxinus-tree on Monday September 19 2016, @11:15AM

    by fraxinus-tree (5590) on Monday September 19 2016, @11:15AM (#403670)

    so who really bothers buying them today?

  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Monday September 19 2016, @12:11PM

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 19 2016, @12:11PM (#403686) Journal

    The rot set in with the LaserJet 4. The III was the last good series of HP LaserJets. Those were the days, when the CPU in your printer was ten times as powerful as the one in your PC :-)

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday September 19 2016, @03:56PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Monday September 19 2016, @03:56PM (#403813) Journal

      Those were the days, when the CPU in your printer was ten times as powerful as the one in your PC

      And back in those days, the bottleneck with printing was CPU speed. I had a laser printer from that era that had a 50MHz MIPS processor and could just about get its rated print speed if you sent it PCL. If you sent it moderately complex PostScript then it would easily take upwards of 30 seconds per page. It took Adobe a long time to realise that a Turing complete language is a terrible idea for a printer. If you were lucky and had a nice fast print server, then the bottleneck often became the parallel port.

      These days, a typical laptop (or even mobile phone) has so much more processing power than the printer (recent Brother printers come with 333MHz MIPS cores) and there's enough bandwidth available that you can send pre-rasterised images directly to the printer without causing a bottleneck (though it's still a good idea to send vector data where possible, so that it can perform dithering based on knowledge of the print mechanism).

      --
      sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Monday September 19 2016, @06:33PM

    by Francis (5544) on Monday September 19 2016, @06:33PM (#403896)

    That was what I'd like to know. The first printer my parents bought was an HP Deskjet 500 and it lasted for many years. The last one we got failed because the mount for the ink cartridges was underengineered. Almost as if it was supposed to fail when you tried to put more ink in.

    I won't be buying any HP printers after that. The company itself is a poor image of it's former self. The hardware used to be quite good back in the day.