Once again I have the printer blues. As a tech geek I have owned just about every brand and kind of printer made. I still miss the always reliable ribbon printers where a new ribbon cost a fraction of the cost of the printer. Now if you need either ink or toner it's about the same cost to buy a printer as a ink or toner cartridge. One of my hobbies is photography and I prefer ink over toner. In photography for the most part I use a little HP printer made just to publish 4X6 family portraits.
My blues this time around is thanks to the Epson Corporation. I had purchased a combination of an Epson inkjet printer and a add on external ink tank made by a third party. It was a great deal, instead of purchasing expensive Epson ink cartridges I just dumped ink into a tank and just kept printing seemingly for ever. THEN after many, many pages printed up pops a screen "Your Epson Printer is near the end of it's life expectancy, seek service". Really! Epson actually puts a chip in their printers that tell the printer to STOP, game over! Let me remind you it was printing perfect pages.
I contacted two different Epson repair centers. Both said the same thing, throw the printer away. They told me that to re-set the chip inside costs $40.00 and both repair centers said "It's not worth it, throw it away". Well I've taken their advice and thrown away every Epson printer I could find laying around and you can bet an Epson printer will never re-enter my computing domain.
The point of this post is to warn you about the planed product obsolescence of Epson printers. I feel what they are doing is wrong and immoral. As far as a marketing strategy I can not imagine how Epson would think this could work in their favor. Epson owners beware.
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