HP’s TIME-BOMBED PRINTHEADS

[Anonymous]

HP’s Time-Bombed Printheads
It’s
not that much of a surprise anymore to discover printer manufacturers
embedding chips in their ink cartridges to force customers to buy more
consumables. But one reader feels that HP went a little too far when it
included an automatic expiration date in the printheads as well in one
of its high-end ink jet models.”I have an HP DesignJet 10PS that I paid
a considerable sum of money for,” the reader wrote. “This printer is
used for the printing of color proofs for a printing firm and is driven
by a specialized RIP driver. What makes me mad as hell is that the
printheads are supposed to have a life of 25,000 prints. What they
don’t tell you when you buy the printer is that within a few days of a
date stamped on the printheads, the printheads will die. The same seems
to apply for the ink tanks.”HP has said that users should get about 30
months of use after the expiration date on the printhead, but that has
not been the reader’s experience at all. “I purchased the printer in
2002, and the printheads started failing about 18 months later. A call
to HP revealed that the printheads were warranted for 25,000 prints or
until the dates on the heads. The interesting thing was that the dates
on the printheads that were failing had just been passed. Now I am
passing the date on the second batch of printheads and they are
starting to fail, too. I had a printhead fail last month before its
expiration date and HP failed to respond to me before I had to replace
it. I am going to try to get HP to pay for the replacement, but I doubt
it will do any good.”It doesn’t help that HP’s once legendary printer
support is now very hard to talk to unless you pay. “They don’t respond
to e-mails and I can’t afford to pay $40 to get them to talk to me on
the phone over a $39 printhead. And I paid $199 for an extension of the
warranty and they tell me that it was never done. They sure charged the
credit card.”As the reader uses the printer only for occasional jobs,
the cost of having to replace printheads and ink cartridges every two
years is particularly grating. “The printer gets light use, so I figure
that it costs me about $20.00 per print when I factor in the time bomb
in the printheads. And I can’t buy spares for fear they will time out
before installation. Why can’t they sell a printer that works until
things wear out instead of putting a time bomb chip in the parts? What
ever happened to the leader in printing solutions? RIP HP, I will never
buy from you again, nor will I let a client make the mistake of buying
an HP printer.”

[Author]

December 7, 2006 at 1:34 PM