They use the small flash inside the DRM chip in the cartridge to store the telemetry, then the e-waste companies are paid by HP to read and send to the mothership the contents of the chips sent to recycle
They use the small flash inside the DRM chip in the cartridge to store the telemetry, then the e-waste companies are paid by HP to read and send to the mothership the contents of the chips sent to recycle
After many years, I switched from HP to Epson. Back in the days, HP delivered quality, but the last two printers of them that we had showed that this was no longer the case.
Best way to go is a color laser printer. Brother is usually pretty good in that regard. Buy one and it’ll be the last printer you need for decades. I have a Canon multifunction color laser, it was like $500 but that was 10 years ago and it’s still on the first set of toner. For someone like me who doesn’t print much it’s the perfect choice because the ink doesn’t dry out like inkjet ink.
Second best choice is a continuous ink feed printer. Epson has one called eco tank, but there are others. Basically instead of cartridges, the ink comes in bottles and you pour it into tanks in the side of the printer. Tubes carry the ink from the side tanks to the printhead. Even the official tanks hold a lot more ink than the similarly priced cartridge, and you can get knock off ink much much cheaper. No DRM, no chips, no telemetry, no bullshit. It’s still an inkjet printer with all the downsides that carries, but much less printer manufacturer bullshit.
We now use the Epson Ecotank printers. We don’t print enough for a laser printer. And Canon is a brand I will never ever buy again.
I’ve found lasers to work better for infrequent printing because toner doesn’t dry out and clog things like ink does. Does the Ecotank have that issue if it’s months between prints?
Don’t know about months. we print once or twice a week, with some spells where we print dozens of jobs on one weekend. But so far we had way less issues than with HP. Occasionally, it did a head clean.
With the last set of cartridges on the HP, they basically went into the head cleaning dump - with a two page color print, the second page lost color, and it needed a deep clean to come back. And returned to the problem when I printed the next batch half an hour later. Basically a 100 quid cardridge set for printing maybe 20-30 pages with color. And it was not even full page color, but a set of 15 cards on a page, each with a small picture of the item.
I just retired a 20ish year old brother multifunction black and white laser for a new Brother color LED multifunction.
Very happy with both, the one I just retired still worked great, but I got tired of jumping through hoops to get the network scanner drivers working on current OSes.