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One man's effort to sue HP Inc for preventing his printers from working and forcing him to use its own branded, and more expensive, ink cartridges can move forward in California.
Florida man John Parziale was furious when he discovered in April last year that HP had automatically updated his two printers so they would no longer accept ink cartridges from third-party vendors – cartridges he had already bought and installed.
That month, HP emitted a remote firmware update, without alerting users, that changed the communication protocol between a printer's chipset and the electronics in its inkjet cartridges so that only HP-branded kit was accepted. The result was that Parziale's printer would no longer work with his third-party ink. He saw a series of error messages that said he needed to replace empty cartridges and that there was a "cartridge problem."
Parziale sued the IT titan in its home state of California, arguing he would never have bought the HP printers if he knew they would only work with HP-branded ink cartridges. At the time, the cartridges he bought to go with the machine did in fact work and were printing merrily right up to the point the DRM-style update was sent.
[...] But feeling ripped off and beating a tech giant in court are two different things, as Parziale found out this month [PDF] when federal district judge Edward Davila threw out most of his claims against HP. Four of five allegations he had made were under America's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), accusing HP of abusing its "authorized access" to his devices. These were rejected because, the judge noted, he had granted HP remote access to his printer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:12PM (8 children)
Cheap-ish Sumsung Laser printer owner here. No more dried up ink when the printer is needed. That alone is worth the switch to laser printer.
Yeah - I know - no colours but that's not an issue for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:42PM (5 children)
> Cheap-ish Sumsung Laser printer owner here.
Hello! Model number, please? Does it require proprietary drivers in order to function in Linux?
(Score: 3, Informative) by KritonK on Thursday April 30 2020, @01:33PM (1 child)
Former Samsung laser printer owner here. Yes, you do need to download custom drivers, which, apart from the PPDs contain a few executables (x86 and x86_64 only). What's more, you need to download them from HP, who now own Samsung's printer division.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday April 30 2020, @10:08PM
+1 Ouch
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @02:00AM
I have a HP OfficeJet 2620. The drivers and software come pre-installed with Ubuntu.
The scanning Just Works.
I don't use it to print. I go to Officeworks for that. Never put the print cartridges in.
I only wanted a scanner that works in Linux to scan letters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2020, @02:35AM (1 child)
I have the Samsung ML-1860
openprinting says Black & White printer, this is a Paperweight
But installing using the Samsung CLP-310 Foomatic/foo2qpdl ppd it works, haven't tested all options. The 16xx seem more supported. They are old models though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2020, @12:18PM
You should update the info.
I too have one that says it should be crap. A PIXMA MP640, but it works fine... now if only I could remember how I set it up in the first place..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @06:48PM
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/01/hp-completes-purchase-samsung-printer-business.html [cnbc.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @05:52PM
Brother has some very nice color capable laser printers, I think they need drivers for cups, but work with lpr, netcat, etc. out of the box.