The swindle of the ink printer

The ink is created from a base resin that is mixed in tanks with it corresponding colorant to get the colors cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and the cartridges must cost only $ 3. Then, if aren't made with unicorn blood, why are so expensive? It is obvious that is because the business model of the manufacturers of printers is sell cheap printers and take profit of the sell with the cost of the cartridges. Due to that, also, they don't offer any kind of service of replenishment of the cartridges and worse, they prevent that you can fill them, putting a counter in the electronics of the cartridge, which avoid that you can print when has arrived to a determinate number of prints. This counter comes in a chip that also prevent that you can use cartridges of other compatible marks, because it use some authentication algorithm. When a cartridge manufacturer achieve hack some of these chips and build compatible cartridges (which aren't a lot of more cheap), sometimes are called pirate cartridges, but this is a name that I dislike, because the original cartridges are the bad ones, because they go against the recycling and the environment.

Also exists devices to reset the counter of the cartridges and in this way can refill them, although this kind of hardware is difficult to find it out of Internet.

This suppose a constant fight between the manufacturers of compatible cartridges and the manufactures of printers that always are modifying the format of the cartridges, to make it incompatible with the previous model, and due to that the manufacturers of the compatible cartridges have to find the way of do new cartridges for the new models. For that, is also common, the technique of put a counter in the printer that count the number of prints o the number of times that put on and off. When the printer arrives to that number, stop working. This is called planned obsolescence, and when occurs we have to buy a new model that don't have compatible cartridges.

The excuse to put this counter, is that the ink that is released in the cleaning of the cartridges is going accumulating in a inkpad. This cleaning is made each time that the printer is turned on and, probably, it waste more ink than the necessary. In the next video we can see the ink deposit of a printer that had arrived to this state:

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The most economic and healthy for the environment, is search a printer that we know that can be hacked, to replenish the cartridges with ink that we can buy at good price in internet, although this is quite more cumbersome and a lot of users prefers spend more, for the comfort of haven't got to do this work and have to learn how replenish the cartridges and reset the chips. If yourselves neither see this as a viable alternative, the cheaper alternative, in reference to the ink, are the laser monochrome printers, because although a toner is a lot of more expensive, the number of pages that can print is a lot of higher but, anyway, neither we get rid of that the printer stop working when it arrives to certain number of impressions.