Planned Obsolescence Rears Its Ugly Head in Epson Printer Spat - ExtremeTech:
A recent tweet about a self-bricking Epson printer has reminded everyone how important the right to repair is. The printer in question alerted its owners that it had reached the end of its lifespan, and then promptly stopped working. Epson's response is a reminder that many of the devices you own come with secret expiration dates.
While most technologies have become more versatile and reliable over the years, printers are an outlier: They're terrible. In this instance, the cause of the end-of-life message is the ink pads. These components are designed to soak up excess ink so it doesn't get smeared on your pages or leak from the printer. Epson has determined how long these parts usually last, and when the timer is up, the printer just stops working.
The solution is also a problem: Epson says you can ship the printer back for service or have a certified repair technician replace the parts. In either case, the parts, labor, and shipping won't be cheap. [...]
[...] According to The Verge, Epson has updated a support article to downplay the ludicrousness of its decisions. Previously, the page noted that servicing an aging printer is often not worth the money, so most people just buy new ones. This is, of course, entirely thanks to the way Epson has opted to design its printers. The page does point out you can recycle the old printer, and recycling is good. True, Epson, but continuing to use a device that's perfectly functional is better.
At least I'm not getting robocalls telling me my Epson printer is about to expire.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Pslytely Psycho on Friday August 19 2022, @07:00AM (1 child)
"At least I'm not getting robocalls telling me my Epson printer is about to expire."
Dear god man, don't give them ideas.....
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Friday August 19 2022, @02:52PM
Speaking of ideas, is there any planned obsolescence for printer manufacturers?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Snospar on Friday August 19 2022, @08:05AM (8 children)
The ink pads...
WTF? What "excess ink" are we talking about here, that stuff is more expensive than gold! We shouldn't be wasting it. I gave up on ink jet printers based on the fact that I don't print often and every time I did the printer went through a cleaning-the-nozzles routine where it jetted ink into these built in reservoirs. After, what seemed like, a handful of pages I was getting warnings about the ink running out again.
I picked up a cheap Colour Laserjet with a ridiculous cashback offer that meant it was almost free. I know the consumables will be horrifically expensive but I've had it for 3 years and still haven't had to replace them.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Friday August 19 2022, @08:22AM
I bought a cheap Xerox colour laser in 2009. It was a WinPrinter but I found Linux drivers for the FujiXerox branded version. It came with a voucher for four replacement toner cartridges. It goes for years without needing new toner. I now replace it with unbranded cartridges which work perfectly and are comparatively cheap. It was a bargain.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Friday August 19 2022, @08:28AM (4 children)
Thanks for the LaserJet suggestion. Got a part number you recommend?
I am looking at a Canon PIXMA G3202, but still leery over issues like privacy and forced obsolesence issues. I would love to print, over my own private intr*a*net, from my Android phone.
I don't want connection of any kind to the public internet.
"Internet Connection Required" to me is business talk that means "not this one. Keep looking.".
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Friday August 19 2022, @09:04AM (1 child)
Well I've since read a lot of bad press about HP (on this very site) but I ended up with an HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw [amazon.co.uk]. I don't think that model is available any more and the prices of similar units are eye watering. My choice was driven mainly by price, it was reduced in a sale and had an additional cashback voucher available. Overall I've been very happy with it for my limited needs. Any photo printing I need (which is even rarer than normal printing) I simply send off to the likes of photobox.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday August 19 2022, @10:31AM
Thanks!
I've used the HP LaserJets for years. Their weak point was the fuser. And a bad capacitor in the power supply. Both appeared to be easily fixable issues.
Right now, I am running a HP LaserJet P3005. Still working great. No issues. I use both its parallel interface for my old DOS machine and it's USB for my WIN7 box ( yes, old stuff, but it does what I need and so far has run without issue. )
My old HP seems to not have a problem with sleeping for a year, until it's time to print out tax forms again. I wonder how tolerant an inkjet is to extended idle periods. ( That built in scanner looks very useful!)
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deimtee on Friday August 19 2022, @10:17AM
I bought a Samsung CLP315 for AU$166 about 12 years ago. It's still working. It came with "starter" cartridges that are supposed to do about 500 pages, but I haven't used them up yet. I picked it because it had linux drivers.
Just checked and https://www.inkstation.com.au/ [inkstation.com.au] has replacement toner for $100 for the four colour pack.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday August 19 2022, @07:37PM
For non-color (and maybe color) LaserJets, one company has remanufactured some of the parts that tend to wear out [printertechs.com] on the LaserJet 4250n, which is already a workhorse by itself. If you scroll down to the YouTube video, you can tell that they're kind of obsessive about extending operating life for this printer. Based on that, you could ask them if they've done anything comparable for color LaserJets.
(Score: 2) by owl on Friday August 19 2022, @03:49PM
No, but it is in the best interest of the printer makers to waste more than necessary on "head cleaning" because doing so drives sales of replacement ink costing $8,234.53/oz. And the home ink-jet printer market is upside down. The hardware is often sold at a loss, and all the profit is derived from sales of that $8,234.53/oz ink.
And herein lies the reason why they do it. The print head nozzles are exposed to the environment when at rest. And if not used often enough, the ink can dry up inside the nozzles. The 'cleaning' is to get that dried gook out. Now, granted, they are incentivized to use "more ink than necessary" to perform the cleaning, because doing so drives a potential future sale of $8,234.53/oz ink.
Yes, and of course those warning are to scare folks into going and buying some more $8,234.53/oz ink cartridges.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormreaver on Friday August 19 2022, @11:19PM
Neither ink nor toner is expensive if you buy from 3rd parties. My toners cost about $20 each, and my ink cartridges cost about $2 each. At my printing rate, they last for a couple years before I need to replenish. They have made inkjets viable again.
(Score: 3, Funny) by fraxinus-tree on Friday August 19 2022, @08:26AM
This never happened before.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by hdonk on Friday August 19 2022, @09:05AM
This is weird. I have an Epson WF-7610, and the cleaning inkpad is replaceable...
Must be down to business vs consumer printers...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Friday August 19 2022, @11:58AM (1 child)
That is absolutely dumb, and wrong.
The right way is to randomly start producing minor fake glitches that nobody can prove are actually programmed in, increasing in frequency and severity as it approaches a target expiration date. The device may even sort of still work after that date so lawyers can say it still "works", but no consumer would want to mess with it. :P
Go ahead. Prove that your glitchy old devices aren't already programed to behave that way.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Spamalope on Friday August 19 2022, @12:19PM
That's the iPhone 'slower every update' strategy, isn't it. OFC the updates are mandatory...
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday August 19 2022, @12:10PM
These Epson printers need to be liberated from their lock-in parts. The piezo print heads are really decent and can deal with different inks, including UV-curing and Direct-to-Garment stuff. There's already a little cottage industry around conversions, but the players all want to keep the secrets they have picked up elsewhere. The piezo driving process is more or less documented at a low level (patents and some experiments), but the assembly pieces to get something really useful out of it are not in place yet. I'd have a two-raspi solution in mind with a big one in front, running a networked Ghostscript rasterizer and a Pico with its PIO to generate the complex waves required for the head and to drive the steppers.
That way, the "junk" that also formerly used shitty, bloated, proprietary USB drivers could be converted into something useful rather than trashing it. You'd even be able to clean specific nozzles instead of dumping the entire tank.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by progo on Friday August 19 2022, @01:30PM (2 children)
It's a fucking ink jet printer! Don't try to tell me this can't be made so that the owner can pull out the used-up part and replace it with a fresh part.
Home printers and scanners are such a scam!
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday August 19 2022, @04:35PM
Think of the children! Do you know what damage it can do to a child if they get to see a naked ink pad? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2022, @07:28PM
Home printers and scanners are such a scam!
Which is part of the reason I haven't had one for 20 years now. The real reason though is that I just wasn't using it that often. Back when only some of us had PCs, it made sense to print out a bit of the Internet for grandma, but now you can even send email to grandma so what's the point?
On those rare occasions when I actually want or need a hard copy, I got to Kinko's/FedEx (whoever owns it now) and print. I let them deal with all the BS. I know I've spent far less on per-page printing services over the years than if I owned my own printer, and there's no wasted space in my work area.
I know a musician who has a black and white laser for printing sheet music and of course general business stuff. He gave me a printed chord chart for basic guitar lessons recently and that's handy. If I were in that situation I'd probably still have one. Some musicians use iPads now, but if you don't know the tune by heart it's a bit of gamble to run the risk of losing your sheet music in the middle of a performance due to technical issues, so printed music still kind of rules.
Anyway, I think a lot of us might be stuck on the idea of having a printer when we don't often need them any more. Certainly the need for a *color* printer is not that great, and some of the black and white laser printers don't have so much BS going on because I guess the whole idea of reloading toner took hold early and they can't stuff that genie back in.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MIRV888 on Saturday August 20 2022, @01:31AM
I've bought a Epson photo model and installed an external ink reservoir immediately.
Its had a ton of use between myself & my daughter. One day it quit and said the lifetime# of pages had been exceeded and it was no good anymore (go buy another printer).
I was dumbfounded.
So I did a little research on the web and found a shady app that resets the ink usage/ pages printed value.
It's like buttah.
(Score: 1) by GloomMower on Saturday August 20 2022, @06:04AM
Are there repairs done by Shaq?
I thought their deal was reasonable priced ink. Guess expired printers was the compromise.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mrchew1982 on Saturday August 20 2022, @11:03AM
The article fails to mention that Epson's ecotank printers have replaceable ink pads that come standard with the ink refill packs. I've had one of them for what seems like a decade and have zero complaints. Ink is cheap and no break downs, and that's saying a lot with a "planner freak" wife who probably prints two to three hundred pages a month making her own Franklin style planners.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2022, @01:50PM
Cost less than $100, never printed with it, used as a scanner only, Just Works on Ubuntu. Second OfficeJet. I will buy another. No stuffing around, works well. One day maybe I'll try printing on it :P