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The Bottom Line
I am fascinated that there has not been a class action law suit over this yet. I emailed one law firm advertising class action work and the reply I received was that they had a "conflict of interest," meaning they either have HP as a customer, are already suing HP for something else (not surprising,) or are simply not interested in pursuing it. HP is selling toner, then preventing the printer from functioning when the "smart chip" claims the cartridge is empty. Then HP is having you send as much as 60% of the remaining toner that is still left in the cartridge back to them and likely harvesting and reselling it again.A Testament To The Quality Printers Of The Good Ol' Days
Sometime in 2006 (may have been late 2005) my trusty HP Laserjet IIp of over 15 years finally gave out on me. That printer was a tank. I printed literally thousands of pages on that printer without so much as a hick-up. I had to replace the toner cartridge many times. When it began to run low on toner, the signs were obvious: patchy coverage, and faded or even blank areas spanning a particular column area on the page. Quickly removing, shaking for a moment, and reinstalling the toner cartridge would often make it last long enough to finish my work while making a note to get another one. I don't think the drum was ever replaced and the print quality looked as good as I could ever remember. The laserjet IIp was slow but made a good backup for the HP Lsaerjet 4mp plus which I used for printing invoices for the customers of a business I owned at the time. The 4mp also was a tank but with greater speed, paper capacity, and toner capacity. It too never needed a single drum replacement and worked like a champ. It was still in service that fateful day when I decided to bite the color laserjet bullet and gave away the trusty 4mp that was still working. It went to a good home with a family in my neighborhood that did not have much.Out With The Old!
The choice was obvious, HP made great printers right? Wrong. It seams HP has jumped aboard the "disposable printer express" and sold it's customers out just like all the other manufacturers.In With The New!
Enter the HP Laserjet 2840 multifunction color laser printer. I read the online reviews which all looked good. The 2840, along with the rest of the printers in that series including the less feature rich 2820 and 2800, all received high marks in print quality, reliability, and ease of use. The reviews covered most of the major bases that I cared about. Little did I know that apparently all the reviewers had apparently acclimated to the poor quality of today's printers and that was the bar they were using to judge the thing. With a price tag of nearly $1200.00 retail, (paid just under $900 for mine) they are not exactly on the super cheap side but apparently for color laser printing this device was supposed to be a mid-range small business grade color laserjet.The Adventure Of Discovery...So Painful, So Expensive
This printer came with supposedly high capacity cartridges but they looked pitifully small in comparison to the toner cartridges I had previously purchased for the 4mp and IIp printers. Granted, now there were 4 of them and the size of the printer was significantly larger than their gray scale predecessors. These cartridges supposedly had a page count of 5000 at 5% coverage for the color cartridges and 7000 at 5% coverage for the black cartridge. Does anyone really only do 5% coverage (of one color) when printing in color? I went ahead and used it with black only for several more months printing invoices for the customers of my business while occasionally printing in color. After selling most of the assets of the business a short while later, I personally purchased the laserjet 2840 from my business (to placate the IRS) and began using it for personal use. I had recently been asked by my local congregation to print the program for Sunday meetings. Little did they know they would be getting such professional looking programs. I printed a total of between 60 and 80 programs each week. They were one page, double sided, and folded in half with a fairly detailed and high resolution image on the front with colorful fonts, tables, and text on the inside and a nice color printout of the current months calendar with events on the back. After only a few months (just under 1,000 pages) the printer began to issue warnings of low toner.The Scam
I went out to purchase new toner cartridges. They were nearly $110.00 each. That is almost $450.00 or one half the value of the printer in the first place. So I bought them and after bringing them home and opening them I found a convenient prepaid UPS pickup service shipping label inside the box. You just put the new one in the printer, put the old one in the box, call UPS (or jump on their web site) and a truck will be there to pick it up.I asked myself: Why would a company go to such effort to get a used cartridge back? Why does the idiotic printer refuse to print anything as soon as any one of the cartridge or drum chips thinks it is empty? Why can one not simply override this behavior? Why is this printer running out of toner so quickly? That has not been my experience with laser printers. Previously the toner had lasted for many hundreds if not thousands of pages more! My curiosity got the best of me and I began digging deeper into this "smart chip" concept. I discovered the "smart chips" were being adopted by all printer manufacturers "so they can guarantee high quality printing." Wink, wink ;) In reality, they are deducting more from the "balance" of the chip than what is actually being printed on the page. Consequently these printer manufacturers are taking extreme advantage of US, the consumers.
How I Uncovered The Scam
I searched out a toner manufacturer that provided high quality color laser toner in bottles and also provided factory new "smart chips." The chip is stuck onto the printer cartridge with double sided sticky tape. There is no way for the chip to really know how much toner is left in the cartridge. It is more like an educated guess based on how much of each of the three colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) has been printed on each page. I ordered several sets of replacements chips and two full bottles of each color of toner with the black bottle being a little larger than the others due to it's supposedly increased capacity, albeit the cartridge is certainly not physically larger. At only $9.00 per chip and around $15.00 per toner bottle I could replace these things 11 times before even coming close to the replacement cost for an HP toner cartridge. Anyway, I went ahead and printed using my brand spanking new super duper expensive HP replacement cartridges.The first chip to read empty was the black one; not surprising since most of my printing is black and white. So I replaced the chip and kept right on printing...with absolutely no change in print quality. I continued like this until that chip read empty without ever having put any toner into the cartridge. I only replaced chips. I also repeated this for each color cartridge as they read empty with the same results. I kept track of cartridge type, chip change dates, pages printed, and other less pertinent pieces of data. After these chip replacements showed empty, I replaced the chip yet again (third time now) and kept on printing. After printing 50 or so pages of your average print job, the printer zeroed the chip. It was nearly 97% full and the printer just emptied it, just like that, in one fell swoop. I thought, how can that be? Well apparently this thing has an additional mechanism for determining when there is actually no more toner left in the cartridge and when print quality begins to degrade. I had similar results for each of the other cartridges, some few number of pages after replacing the third chip, the chip would get zeroed. Initially I thought they might have been bad chips, but the consistent way they were getting zeroed was simply too coincidental. I never did need to replace the drum but instead just kept replacing the drum chip. I never had any loss of print quality and the idiotic printer broke before the drum ever came close to wearing out. I paid $89.00 to some service outfit to come fix the printer and it turns out the printer is not even fixable. The plastic parts that wore are not even replaceable.