A few weeks in the past, College of New Haven lecturer Mark Tavern tweeted concerning the demise of his spouse’s Epson inkjet printer. The tweet went viral, and has since sparked a web-based dialogue concerning the reliability and repairability of inkjet printers. Epson is on the middle of this dialogue, after all, however it’s hardly the one vendor at fault.
Within the case of those Epson printers, evidently there are ink pads contained in the printer that, after prolonged use, can grow to be saturated with ink. When this occurs, the printers will show an error message that claims “components contained in the printer have reached the top of their service life,” after which utterly stop functioning.
As a result of the message does not clarify that there was any precise failure—and since the printer could have been printing flawlessly moments earlier than—this message appears to the unaware consumer to be an arbitrary lifetime restrict positioned on the printer by Epson. The corporate’s response to the controversy did not assist, both: both pay to have us repair it, or purchase a brand new one.
It is nonetheless fairly crappy that its printers will primarily brick themselves, with completely no warning, over what’s essentially a really fixable challenge. There are all types of tutorials on YouTube that present customers eradicating and cleansing the ink pads to resolve the issue, and whereas it requires a modicum of mechanical ability, it isn’t a tough operation. It is actually not one thing we’d pay a restore store 100 bucks to do.
As we mentioned above, Epson isn’t the one printer firm partaking in shady shenanigans to shift extra printers. We have reported earlier than on HP’s poor conduct, and earlier this yr, Canon acquired hoist by its personal official-cartridge-lockout petard. Whereas smartphones, sport consoles, and laptops have been the massive headline objects for the right-to-repair motion, printers—particularly inkjets—positively deserve some consideration from that crowd, too.
