Printer Companies Shunning Third-Party Ink. What You Need to Know

One of the leading printer manufacturers, HP, has been actively attempting to disable any ink cartridges that they didn’t produce, which is causing some strife among users of the products. Let’s take a look at what this means for users and for businesses that rely on HP printers. 

An HP Firmware Update Renders Third-Party Cartridges Useless

HP, claiming that they are acting in the best interest of their customers’ security, has received substantial backlash from users of their printers when they pushed out a firmware update that rendered printers outfitted with third-party ink cartridges completely useless. The thing is, this is not the first time HP has taken actions like this. They have been the defendant in many class action lawsuits and have paid out millions of dollars in settlements, but continue to persist in efforts to maintain their printers are their intellectual property, and therefore, they have the right to manufacture the ink and toner needed to make these machines usable. 

Basically, when a user goes to use an HP printer, if the device doesn’t read the HP security chip or circuitry that HP has built into their proprietary cartridges, it won’t print. In the past, an error message would pop up saying that the printer “can’t guarantee quality”. Now it never gets this far; the print job is just canceled, leaving users frustrated. 

How Changes Like This Affect IT Management

With so much to consider, all this issue does is throw another wrench into your well laid plans. This is especially true if you have already invested money in purchasing off-brand print cartridges that don’t work any longer. This is just another issue that people that are running a business don’t have time for. 

That’s why the IT professionals at SCW offer a myriad of services designed to help you get some peace of mind about things like this. Our team stays up on technology-related issues and uses that breadth of industry knowledge to deliver services like vendor management to our clients. That way you can focus on your business, while your IT is covered by certified professionals.

If you would like to learn more about how our brand of managed IT services can work to help you be less distracted with minutiae and more focused on the health of your business, give us a call today at (509) 534-1530.