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posted by martyb on Monday January 20 2020, @11:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-owns-what dept.

Ryan Sullivan cancelled what he thought was a "random charge for $4.99 per month from HP called 'Instant Ink'". Then his printer refused to print:

It turns out that HP requires its customers to enroll HP Instant Ink eligible printers into one of the Instant Ink plans, and continue paying a monthly subscription in order to be allowed to use the device.

But where's the need to come up with different plans coming from, you may wonder? HP explains: the company charges a fee based on the number of pages a customer prints each month, and the page count is shockingly monitored remotely.

Naturally, the scheme is not advertised as a rather unusual application of DRM, but a way for customers to save time and money. Still, it would seem HP has not exactly gone out of its way to explain all the consequences to those customers.

HP's terms of service also say that these eligible, internet-connected printers can be remotely modified in several ways, including by applying patches, updates, and "changes" – without notifying customers.

Another thing HP can see thanks to the Instant Ink program is the type of documents you print, identifying them by extension as Word, etc., documents, PDFs, or JPEG and other types of images.

Additionally, the HP cartridges have been locked to specific printers for quite a while now.

Earlier on SN:
US Customers Kick Up Class-Action Stink Over Epson's Kyboshing of Third-Party Ink (2019)
Xerox Is No More (2018)
Meg Whitman Resigns (2017)
Supreme Court Lets Consumers Refill Ink Cartridges (2017)
HP to Issue "Optional Firmware Update" Allowing 3rd-Party Ink (2016)


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday January 21 2020, @08:22PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Tuesday January 21 2020, @08:22PM (#946522) Homepage

    I've had 2 HP color printers and the second one was a nice photo printer but it was gifted to me so I didn't complain...at first.

    Until I realized that you have to explicitly tell it that you want greyscale, otherwise, it defaults to using the colors' ink to print greyscale even though there is a separate dedicated black cartridge. Totally wasteful.

    Oh yeah, and it wouldn't print at all, not even greyscale, using only the black cartridge unless all cartridges including the colored ones were installed and not empty. In my specific example, I ran out of yellow. No big deal, I had plenty of ink in the dedicated black cartridge and was only printing greyscale Word documents. Nope. You're not printing anything, at all, until you buy another 40-dollar yellow cartridge. And if your magenta cartridge is also empty, you're gonna have to also buy that one.

    After consulting the forums and seeing that all the hacks and workarounds no longer worked on my machine, it was at that point that I literally threw the whole fucking thing right into the dumpster and went to a FedEx center and had the 3 greyscale pages printed for like 30 cents. Color pages are like 80 cents/each. And if you need to use one of their computers there to do some last-minute editing, a quick session will run you a couple bucks.

    The way I see it, if you're going to be printing fat books of pages on a regular basis and don't want to go to a copy center, you might as well buy a used full-size business printer/copier and definitely not an HP-branded one.

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