“Your printer is lying to you” by Christopher Null of Yahoo! Tech Blogs is the story of a man who refused to believe his printer when it claimed to be running out of toner. Farhad Manjoo covered the sensor on his toner cartridge with electrical tape, and his Brother printer is still churning out prints from the same toner cartridge eight months later.
Printer companies make a significant portion of their profits from ink and toner sales, and many of them use various methods of “expiring” perfectly good cartridges in order to motivate customers to spend more money on refills. Manjoo’s toner cartridge wasn’t empty — his printer was just giving him a little extra nudge towards the office supply store.
This has been going on for a long time. I had an HP 3-in-1 that cost me two thirds the price of a new machine to replace the black and tri-color cartridge. Every month they encouraged me to do fun projects with my printer like make a calender using my own photos. Such fun! And it only cost me $75 in ink! Weeeeee, ain’t we got fun!
September 28th, 2008