[Infowarrior] - Take That, Stupid Printer!

[Richard Forno]

Take That, Stupid Printer!
How to fight back against the lying, infuriating, evil ink-and-toner  
cabal.
By Farhad Manjoo
Posted Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008, at 3:21 PM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2198316/


I bought a cheap laser printer a couple years ago, and for a while, it  
worked perfectly. The printer, a Brother HL-2040, was fast, quiet, and  
produced sheet after sheet of top-quality prints—until one day last  
year, when it suddenly stopped working. I consulted the user manual  
and discovered that the printer thought its toner cartridge was empty.  
It refused to print a thing until I replaced the cartridge. But I'm a  
toner miser: For as long as I've been using laser printers, it's been  
my policy to switch to a new cartridge at the last possible moment,  
when my printouts get as faint as archival copies of the Declaration  
of Independence. But my printer's pages hadn't been fading at all. Did  
it really need new toner—or was my printer lying to me?

To find out, I did what I normally do when I'm trying to save $60: I  
Googled. Eventually I came upon a note on FixYourOwnPrinter.com posted  
by a fellow calling himself OppressedPrinterUser. This guy had also  
suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he'd discovered a way  
to force it to fess up. Brother's toner cartridges have a sensor built  
into them; OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a  
small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking  
he'd installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my  
printer began to work. At least eight months have passed. I've printed  
hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade. On  
FixYourOwnPrinter.com, many Brother owners have written in to thank  
OppressedPrinterUser for his hack. One guy says that after covering  
the sensor, he printed 1,800 more pages before his toner finally ran  
out.

Brother isn't the only company whose printers quit while they've still  
got life in them. Because the industry operates on a classic razor-and- 
blades business model—the printer itself isn't pricy, but ink and  
toner refills cost an exorbitant amount—printer manufacturers have a  
huge incentive to get you to replace your cartridges quickly. One way  
they do so is through technology: Rather than printing ever-fainter  
pages, many brands of printers—like my Brother—are outfitted with  
sensors or software that try to predict when they'll run out of ink.  
Often, though, the printer's guess is off; all over the Web, people  
report that their printers die before their time.

Enter OppressedPrinterUser. Indeed, instructions for fooling different  
laser printers into thinking you've installed a new cartridge are easy  
to come by. People are even trying to sell such advice on eBay. If  
you're at all skilled at searching the Web, you can probably find out  
how to do it for free, though. Just Google some combination of your  
printer's model number and the words toner, override, cheap, and  
perhaps lying bastards.

Similar search terms led me to find that many Hewlett-Packard printers  
can be brought back to life by digging deep into their onboard menus  
and pressing certain combinations of buttons. (HP buries these  
commands in the darkest recesses of its instruction manuals—see Page  
163 of this PDF.) Some Canon models seem to respond well to shutting  
the printer off for a while; apparently, this resets the system's  
status indicator. If you can't find specific instructions for your  
model, there are some catchall methods: Try removing your toner  
cartridge and leaving the toner bay open for 15 or 20 seconds—the  
printer's software might take that as a cue that you've installed a  
new cartridge. Vigorously shaking a laser toner cartridge also gets  
good results; it breaks up clumps of ink and bathes the internal  
sensor in toner.

These tricks generally apply to laser printers. It's more difficult to  
find ways to override ink-level sensors in an inkjet printer, and, at  
least according to printer manufactures, doing so is more dangerous. I  
was able to dig up instructions for getting around HP inkjets' shut- 
off, and one blogger found that coloring in his Brother inkjet  
cartridge with a Sharpie got it to print again. But I had no luck for  
Epson, Lexmark, Canon, and many other brands of inkjets. There are two  
reasons manufacturers make it more difficult for you to keep printing  
after your inkjet thinks it's out of ink. First, using an inkjet  
cartridge that's actually empty could overheat your printer's  
permanent print head, leaving you with a useless hunk of plastic.  
Second, the economics of the inkjet business are even more punishing  
than those of the laser business, with manufacturers making much more  
on ink supplies than they do on printers.

Inkjet makers have a lot riding on your regular purchases of ink—and  
they go to great lengths to protect that market. In 2003, the British  
consumer magazine Which? found that inkjet printers ask for a refill  
long before their cartridges actually go dry. After overriding  
internal warnings, a researcher was able to print 38 percent more  
pages on an Epson printer that had claimed it didn't have a drop left.  
Lawyers in California and New York filed a class-action lawsuit  
against Epson; the company denied any wrongdoing, but it settled the  
suit in 2006, giving customers a $45 credit. A similar suit is pending  
against Hewlett-Packard.

There's also a long-standing war between printer makers and third- 
party cartridge companies that sell cheap knockoff ink packs. In 2003,  
Lexmark claimed that a company that managed to reverse-engineer the  
software embedded in its printer cartridges was violating copyright  
law. Opponents of overbearing copyright protections were alarmed at  
Lexmark's reach; copyright protections have traditionally covered  
intellectual property like music and movies, not physical property  
like printer cartridges. A federal appeals court dismissed Lexmark's  
case, but manufacturers have recently been successful in using patent  
law to close down third-party cartridge companies.

In the long run, though, the printer companies' strong line against  
cartridge makers seems destined to fail. Buying ink and toner is an  
enormous drag. Having to do it often, and at terribly steep prices,  
breeds resentment—made all the worse by my printer's lying ways. Some  
companies are realizing this. When Kodak introduced a new line of  
printers last year, it emphasized its low ink costs. Kodak claims that  
its cartridges last twice as long as those of other printers and sell  
for just $10 to $15 each, a fraction of the price of other companies'  
ink. When my Brother finally runs dry, perhaps I won't replace the  
toner—I'll replace the printer.