Kevin Phillips

It sounds like Canon all-in-one (printer & scanner) have a neat "feature" that disables scanning when the printer is low on ink. So there's now a class action lawsuit. I hope they rip Canon a new one.

There are lots of links out there. Here's one of them:
Gizmodo

E Unit

Yeah, I read about that. Pretty stupid thing to do.

Josh-da-man

I would wager that scanners are so seldom used these days that

1) The guy who is suing them is probably the first one notice.

2) I'm surprised Canon even bothered to include this "feature."

Kevin Phillips

I think you're right with respect to home users. But I bet they are popular with many home businesses and small businesses, where there are probably all kinds of things that have to be scanned.

zyzzle

Plantiffs, enjoy your $1 checks and "valuable" coupons for 10% off replacement ink cartriges, while the lawyers rake in $5 million from this farce..

Really, laser printing is the way to go, and has been for decades now. Inkjets are terribly expensive throwaway products because it'll cost you more to replace the 6 "required" ink cartridges than to just purchase a brand new printer. Rinse and repeat this rubbish and corporate bad stewardship of scarce resources in the name of a dirty quick buck.

PerryD

I worked for a major printer company in a previous life, and I was disturbed to find out that the low and high end versions of one printer was a line of code that throttled the page per minute performance in half, otherwise, they were identical. That line of code was a $200 price difference.

fujishig

While laser jet printing is a lot more efficient, when you do have to refill man are they expensive.

Didn't one company (maybe even canon) come out with a "revolutionary" printer that allowed you to refill your own cartridges?

Kevin Phillips

Yeah, that's been going on for a while. I remember reading, a long time ago, a story about a company that had an IBM punch card system that needed repair. After the tech left, they noticed the punch card system was running about 2x as fast as it used to. When they happened to mention it to their IBM rep., the technician came back, turned a screw, and the punch card system went back to its normal speed. That setting was the only difference between the regular punch card reader and their upgraded version.

PerryD

This was IBM also, pre-Lexmark days.

Josh-da-man

Yeah, but in the long run, aren't you better off with the laser because by the time you need to replace the toner in your printer, you would have spent a lot more on inkjet cartridges to print the same number of pages?

zyzzle

Yes, that's Epson, I believe, and their "Ecotank" printers. Surprise, surprise, these printers start at $250 (about 2.5 - 3x more than other printers with 4 to 6 ink cartridges!) but have huge refillable cartridges which the company *claims* will last thousands of pages and are easy to refill. I've no experience with them, but would be wary.

And yeah, that single line of code "difference" has been going on for probably decades at this point. Many of these things have been reverse-engineered and hacked fimware has been made available to "unlock" the products. That's why I always, with very rare exceptions, get the "lowest-end" tier of any modern electronic product (TVs, Blu-ray players, DVD-drives, printers, CPUs, motherboards, etc) and hack my way into "freeing up" the software walled garden / artificial limitations. Try it, you'll like it. Give a big FUCK YOU to some of those companies!

Coral

Many buy inkjet printers for printing photos/images. Laserjet isn't as good for that.

It's annoying when inkjet printers wont allow you to even print regular text because you ran out of some other colour. You have enough black ink, but because you ran out of cyan - you can't print at all.
Canon's gone one step further disabling the whole piece of hardware even though you don't need any ink at all.

The whole printer market is a scam.

andicus

We have a laser printer/scanner/fax from Brother that has been great. Yeah, it doesn't print in colour, but for how often we need/want to print colour, we just do that at Costco or Staples.

Toner isn't cheap, but not crazy expensive ($66CDN). We've only had to buy it once in at least 8 years.

morriscroy

Does it generate a lot of "ozone" smell while in operation?

andicus

Not that I've noticed. It's just through a doorway but only about 6 feet away, so I expect I would've smelled it.

I'll look out for it next time I print.

D.Pham5GLTE (>60GB)

See if there is generic toner, it’s way cheaper

andicus

I'll keep that in mind, although, at the rate we're going through it, we probably won't need it for at least 6 years. There's about 60% left, and we've had this one since June 2017.

story

"Listen! Do you smell something?!"

Kevin Phillips

I got a black-and-white Xerox laser-printer because I wanted to avoid all the ink bulls---. We bought the printer pre-COVID, but since the pandemic hit, we have been using it a lot more than we used to for work and home and printing my son's school assignments. Toner cartridges ain't cheap, but the price/page can be reasonable. The standard toner cartridge for this printer is rated for 2,600 pages and cost $127, which comes to $0.0488/page. If I get the high-capacity toner for $254, the price per page is $0.0277/page.

There is still price gouging with laser-printers with respect to accessories. An extra sheet feeder is $200. The retail price for a 256MB memory expansion board for the printer is something like $600! Which is beyond insane, since the printer itself only cost about $300. The memory board looks like it may be a standard 144-pin DDR2 SODIMM, which you can buy for under $15.

jpcamb

I had one of those Cannon all-in-one printers and needed to scan things all the time for my previous job and got hit by that bullshit to being able to scan on low ink issue a couple of times. Really pissed me off at the time but I never considered a class action lawsuit. Not worth it to me to sign up and join this as I can expect a check for 1.28 in two years or so.