Sunday 31 October 2010

HP All-in-one models - the way to extort money

Dear HP,

I bought a HP Photosmart C5380 All-inOne multifunctional unit. It is supposed to be a printer, a scanner and a copier, being able to print on paper, CDs, DVDs and photopaper.

First of all I dislike the way you force me to buy new ink cartridges even if there is still ink in the current cartride. I hope somebody reverse-engineers as soon as possible your 364/364XL cartridge chips so I can use my printer at a price lower than that necessary for a tank fill for my car!

Second, even if one of my cartridges is „missing or defective”, the previous one, the empty one which the current one replaced, is definetly OK, so fuck you and your money extrosion schemes.

Third, and the reason for this rant, is that even if ALL the cartridges are empty, I should be able TO USE THE FUCKING SCANNER FUNCTION, since it doesn't depend on the fucking supposedly missing ink! But I can't because you decided that scanning probably needs ink, otherwise I don't understand why would you block the functioning of the whole unit because of some presumed missing ink issue.

I should probably return this device and ask my money back because of this and when they deny this to make a huge scandal about it.

So, HP, FUCK YOU, you well dressed money extortionists!

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

While this sucks, you should have known something like that would happen. It's a HP printer, after all.

Buy Kyocera or some other known-good brands.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info! I added this to my list of reasons I'd like to have free software firmware:

http://lindi.iki.fi/lindi/firmware/free-firmware.txt

Dimitri John Ledkov said...

Wait and see:

"With improved HP Palm Web OS 3.0 on your All-in-one printers you are now required to insert SIM card and top-up before you are able to experience the HP Palm Web OS way of scanning and printing."

Jamaica said...

Exactly this (and some other issues) is the reason why I always say people that they should not buy all-in-one devices. My little sister got another problem with her HP all-in-one device. The color ink is empty and she don't need color in the moment, cause she only needs to print black and white papers. But after the exchange of the black-ink, the device forces her to always make the cartridge calibration process, when ever she turns on the device. And guess what, the calibration process fails, because the color ink is empty.

stavros said...

Wow, they really topped themselves this time.
I have a HP officejet 5510 all-in-one, which I bought 5 years ago or so. It's happily scanning even if no ink in the device.
The calibration problem described by Erich exists, though, but I just ignore the calibration prompt and just do my job.

crep4ever said...

I'm not quite sure but the situation is more or less the same with canon printers. And yes, that's a real shame.

Roshan said...

The situation might not be perfect, but my low-end Canon PIXMA MP145 will scan without being able to print and will print black and white with an empty colour cartridge.

Anonymous said...

I was burnt by this "business method" myself recently. However, I was able to find reset codes ("press reset and power at the same time and when green light blinks press reset 1-7 times") and I got my Canon MP810 pixma to scan even though it thought (wrongly) that its printer head was faulty.

Maybe there are useful data for hp-users also.

http://tricks-collections.com/category/printers-resetter/hp-printers/

eddyp said...

Thanks for all the support messages. I really hope some electronics person (or maybe somebody working at HP) could provide the needed info for the reset. After all, it is probably possible after some usage of an oscilliscope to find out what protocol is used, what data is moved around and what is the prupose of each of the four pins of the cartridges.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately a lot of the Canon all-in-ones do this as well. Depends on the model, a real pain when the print head is broken or some other software bug makes the whole unit unusable because of an issue with the printing sub-system.

Unknown said...

My HP 750 All-In-One I bought 7 years ago don't mind any of this non-sense, and I do skip calibration. Them new __BUGS__

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