Tuesday 19 September 2017

Is your printer really out of ink?

Those readers, as well as Taglines' editors, who regularly get messages indicating that their printer is out of ink may have noticed that by and large you can ignore it. In practice many printers continue to give good results long after they are supposed to be out of ink.
Perhaps it is like your car's fuel gauge which generally has fuel left when the warning light comes on (about 8 litres on our cars). But the printers dont say "you have 50 impressions left", simply "change your cartridge".
This is considered by a French association to be "planned obsolescence" and it is bringing a complaint against several companies under a law passed in 2015. Not only cartridges, but printers themselves are targetted, many considered to break down after a short time in order to boost sales of new products. The law provides for fines up to 300000 euros and two years imprisonment, but lawyers believe that proof will be very hard to find, so it will be interesting to see how the first case of its kind resolves.
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