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Comment by captaincrowbar | Hacker News Reader

Doctorow mentions the cases where a printer company has made their software lie about how much ink was left in a cartridge to make consumers replace them more often. I always wondered why a manufacturer would want to do that. I mean, I understand the motive of making consumers buy ink more often, but from the manufacturer's point of view, why would they want to throw perfectly good ink away? Colour ink isn't as expensive to manufacture as they like to claim but it's still worth something. Why didn't they just put less ink in the cartridge to begin with (and maybe lie about how much was in it), instead of lying about how much was left toward the end of its life and throwing ink away?

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I know of a large printer company who approached a large media company with a deal that would have had the large media company change the color of the text on their printer friendly pages to something near black but requiring the color cartridge instead of true black. As I recall they were willing to pay seven figures annually. The media company did not take them up on their offer.

The underhandedness/cleverness of the printer companies is not to be underestimated.

Wow, that's incredible. Even more surprising is that the media company didn't write a story about this.

Very likely wanted to keep that potential revenue stream in their back pocket for when things got tight

There may have been NDAs involved.

That is such a sneaky move. It is entirely horrible but you have to admire the thought that went into it.

There's a subreddit for ideas like this, called Unethical Life Protips.

I might be missing something here...why would the media company consider it even? Was it because the printer company charged the same price for either ink but had better margins on the colored version they wanted them to switch to?

I think the GP was referring to media that would be printed by others, not the media company.

Wouldn't such a move benefit all printer manufacturers?

If you're big enough, it'd still be profitable even with the other manufacturers free-riding on it.

To say nothing of surreptitious tracking dots on all printed materials.

From an engineering point of view, it's much cheaper to calculate to when 0.01% of cartridges will have run out of ink based on print history vs accurately measuring ink inside the cartridge.

Of course that means that 99.99% of cartridges will be discarded with remaining ink, some of them with a rather significant quantity of ink. And it gives the opportunity to tune this number so cartridges are bought earlier. Although it's up to the manufacturer just how much ink is included, so the usefulness of this tactic is somewhat limited.

I remember what is was like when you'd print a 50 page document only to discover around page 24 you'd start seeing white streaks...and more streaks, and by page 50 you'd have nearly blank pages. Having the printer stop and let you put in a new cartridge when ink is low is a helpful feature.

However, the lockout of third party or even refilled cartridges is just egregious.

> Having the printer stop and let you put in a new cartridge when ink is low is a helpful feature.

Only if it also comes with a "I know it might be streaky, but print it anyway because I own this machine and I'm in charge here" feature.

If I were designing my own printer and wanted to both fully utilize ink cartridges (maximize efficiency) and also be able to print absolutely perfect pages when necessary, it'd be a simple solution: two cartridges. One that is potentially "low" and is used for printing low quality stuff, and one that is guaranteed to be full and is used for printing high quality stuff. Presumably, the "low" cartridge would run out first, and then you just move the existing "high" slot one down and put a new cartridge in the "high" slot. If instead the "high" one ran low first, then replace it with a new one and queue the old one to be the next "low" one when the existing "low" one ran out.

Or something. :)

Close, just have an internal tank that contains ink for printing that is refilled by attaching cartridges. When the cartridge that refills the tank is empty, it's time to swap it.

Delete cartridge, fill in paint directly, and voila we are talking about a high throughput ink printer. These don't have, or at least didn't use to, cartridges, they draw ink from tanks and wet an ink sponge with it.

> One that is potentially "low" and is used for printing low quality stuff, and one that is guaranteed to be full and is used for printing high quality stuff.

It's a good idea, but you do realize that realistically, people would just swap the two out, and in a few weeks or months would just have two near-empty cartridges?

I used to have a truck with two gas tanks, and a switch that would let me toggle which one I used. I would usually be pretty diligent at refilling every time I had to switch over, but there were several occasions when I found myself with both tanks dry.

It's probably to avoid/mitigate lawsuits. It's possible that this would still be covered under false advertising but there's something to be said about the feasibility of testing a lot of unopened packages to show the ink level is low vs having to run all those packages down within the parameters of the device (so the testers aren't seen as the cheaters, over-using the cartridges to make the problem seem worse than it would be for "regular folk"). They'd be dead-to-rights under-filling but they have a better shot (and a better potential settlement) with the under-reporting.

There's a lot a wiggle room in saying that your ink is almost out. The simple defense is that they don't want people to have wasted prints, which might happen if the ink for one color actually runs out, so they notify a little earlier. That "little earlier" is vague and relative, giving a lot of defensible ground for a lawyer to work with if it comes to that. Stating you are selling a certain amount of something and not actually delivering that amount is illegal, and fairly cut and dry at that. It's not hard to see why one is more likely to be attempted than the other for a company.

Right. Putting a different amount of ink in the package than is indicated on the label would be out-and-out fraud, and easily detected. This route operates firmly within a legal grey area.

Plus, increasing the actual volume of product you sell without relying on a commensurate increase in demand is basically printing (heh) money as far as corporate returns are concerned.

If 95% of cartridges with 20ml of ink will only allow 18ml to be consumed, is the 20ml an honest figure?

Related to the above, and possibly specifically because of the above, I've noticed that HP doesn't document ink quantity in cartridges, only approximate cartridge yield in pages.

Oh, and the other thing that drives me batty. Their XL high yield cartridges are sold with "Get up to 2x the pages", but from page count it's clear that it contains 1.5x the amount of ink. So ya, you could get 2x the pages, but only if your pages use less ink. There's a disclaimer, but the link is broken.

http://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-02-cyan-original-ink-cartri... http://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-02xl-high-yield-cyan-origin...

This is one of those ideas that seems obvious at first glance ... and then problematic with more thought. Have you ever gotten 100% of the peanut butter out of a jar? I haven't. Is that fraud? There's a distinction to be made between jars of peanut butter and ink cartridges, but it wouldn't be easy to draw that line. (For an even better example, see Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1 ...)

Sort of, imagine if when you were 90% through a jar of peanut butter it auto-closed the lid and you couldn't even open it.

What's worse would be if peanut butter was widely acknowledged to be safe to eat for 12 months, but the jar wouldn't open after 6 months.

> Have you ever gotten 100% of the peanut butter out of a jar?

Peanut butter? No. I've gotten really close to 100% out of most containers of liquid though.

The exact location of the line between them might be hard to pin down, but when comparing things as dissimilar as that, it's a great big fat line so the overlap of where you put it and where it should be is probably pretty large, making it easy to place with some confidence.

Having the device lie based on the age of the cartridge makes for a more predictable sales volume in the future. See also, inkjets that "clean" the heads by running ink through them on every power cycle.

This is every inkjet I've ever owned or operated. I believe that this accounts for something like 50% of the ink consumed by most printers.

Sensors are expensive. Counters are cheap. Put in ink by weight. Assume pages at 60th percentile use of each color. Set counter. At zero, whine for more ink.

Counters are cheep; they /could/ count the actual requested ink coverage (in actual volume of ink product) across the lifetime of a cartridge.

That would at least give a better estimate and you'd only need to update the batch counter a couple min after a print job (just in case there's another one).

That would allow for a great reduction in programmable memory write cycles. Careful programming would also allow the use of a ring buffer that 'loops' with an erase the ROM page to vastly reduce the write count per cell.

Whining would be fine. The evil part is completely disabling a cartridge because of a color you aren't using is low, or that the cartridge is arbitrarily too old.

If you pay for ink you should be able to use it.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but what is considered a good printer brand nowadays? My requirements:

- Someone who doesn't treat their customer as a criminal (e.g. no DRM in cartridges games, please)

- Works on Linux/MacOS/Windows.

In particular, I'm looking for a printer for my home. I don't print very much, so an inkjet is probably out if the cartridges still have a habit of drying up in a few months.

It's going to be a compromise. This stuff changes all the time, so I can't name any specific brands, but some general advise:

- If the printer is cheap, chances are they make money off cartridges. Expect to pay at least a thousand, but try to get something that will last for that.

- "Pro" lines are less likely to have issues like this. Separately, ditto laser printers. Get a laser printer, color if you must, but greyscale means simpler mechanics, lower price and better reliability.

- Laser printers use ink powder, and won't dry out. Uh, just be careful when refilling.

- Laser printers suck for photo printing, and quality in general is meh. This is something you will have to live with, as an inkjet printer that goes mostly unused will break rather quickly.

- Some brands (at least used to) have refilling the cartridges as an explicit feature. I think that was Brother? No clue if that's still the case.

- Pretty much everything works on all OSs these days, but your experience will generally be better on Linux. Yes, this is quite a change. That said, you might like a network printer better, especially one that can connect to Google's cloud print system. This will be listed on the feature set.

I have always heard that Brother is one of the more ethical companies. Disclaimer: I have never owned one myself.

As a consumer I don't care how much ink is left or wasted. All that matters is the price per page. You can find those prices in any good printer review.

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373165,00.asp

Of course such a situation could be detected...

Right, and it has been. It's hard enough to find that most buyers of printers won't realize it until after you buy the printer. The normal situation was to switch to 3rd party ink, which is now disabled.

HP is clearly abusing their position and printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids you can buy, even more than exotic $10k a bottle wine or perfume by volume.

This will not work if the thing lies based on the age of the cartridge as it will mean the price per page is much more expensive for people use the printer less.

In fact your attitude will probably systematically get you ripped off if you are an ordinary consumer. Since the price-per-page calculation in the review probably comes from an assumption that at the cartridge gets fully used, and the test was probably under a highish workload.

If the company simply puts less ink in the cartridge there will be a difference in durability to third party ones. By simply cutting of the cartridge at a certain point they guarantee that their cartridges last as long as third party's and neither last long.

Lying about the amount of ink is pretty easy to proof. So they would be in trouble quickly. Misoreper4sting the ink level is much more diffuse. The strategy is to lie in a way that won't get you in court.

It's still sold ink though. If you have a performance metric of total ink sold, anything that helps you get more ink out the door is preferable.

Digital electric meters.

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