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Designed to fail
Posted in: OEM, blog by CW on 19 August 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
You may notice that with some manufacturer’s cartridges, our refills don’t behave the same way the originals did when you first install them.
Several manufacturers have decided the best way to keep you buying only original cartridges from them, thus insuring a steady flow of profits into their coffers, is to make your experience with after-market cartridges as unpleasant and difficult as possible. The leader in this effort is Lexmark, but the other companies aren’t far behind.
Lexmark has a series of cartridges labeled “Return Program Cartridge”. This indicates a cartridge purchased for a couple of dollars less than the non-return program version, but one which obliges you to return the cartridge to Lexmark when it is empty. To ensure you do this they disable a portion of the electronic strip on the front of the cartridge when you first install it. Any attempt to reuse that cartridge in the future will produce an error and the printer won’t accept it. The only solution to this is to purchase the “A” version of the cartridge. For example, Lexmark has a #36 cartridge (Return Program) and a #36A cartridge (non-Return Program). Same ink, same ink volume, but the #36A can be reused where the #36 cannot.
Other manufacturers have taken a less drastic but potentially just as effective approach to their loss of profits. Some, like Canon and HP, have elected to put a chip on their cartridge that resets the page counter in the printer when it’s first installed. Inkjet printers have no way to measure the actual ink level inside the cartridge. Instead, every time you install a new cartridge, a page counter inside the printer is reset to zero. It then counts pages based on an algorithm devised by the manufacturer; so much print equals a page’s worth of ink. The industry standard is 5% page coverage equals one page’s worth of ink. Click here for examples of page coverage. By disabling the printer’s ink-level indicator the manufacturers hope to discourage their customers from using anything but cartridges sold by them. We have chip resetters for the majority of chipped cartridges on the market so this ploy doesn’t work all that often.
Manufacturers will try every trick they can think of to lock their customers into buying only original cartridges. The reason is simple and obvious: the majority of their profits come from the sale of cartridges. Almost all of the manufacturers are selling their printers at or below cost, knowing that they’ll make up the loss once you start buying cartridges.
There are a few instances where the manufacturer’s “designed to fail” tactic actually works, preventing us from refilling certain cartridges. These instances are few. For the most part we have ways to get around their efforts to restrict the consumer’s choice in purchasing ink and toner cartridges.
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