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Canon Sued for Disabling Scanner When Printer Runs Out of Ink

Euchre

Summary

Canon is being sued for disabling functions of its multifunction (printer/fax/scanner/copier aka PFSC) devices that don't rely on ink, when the printer is out of ink.

 

Quotes

Quote

David Leacraft, a customer of Canon, filed the class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging deceptive marketing and unjust enrichment by the printer manufacturer. ... While using his Pixma MG6320 printer from Canon, the plaintiff was surprised to discover that the "all-in-one" machine would refuse to scan or fax documents if the printer ran out of ink.

 

My thoughts

This could set precedent which could be used to push back against a number of dubious profiteering tactics used by device makers, including the inability to print in black and white only when color ink runs out.

 

Sources

 https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/legal/canon-sued-for-disabling-scanner-when-printers-run-out-of-ink/

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Hah. That's BS. I hope Canon loses big on this one.

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This is why I have a brother tank printer,  straight from the box it allows me to refill with whatever ink I want and won;t stop printing in black when the color is low.

 

I switched to it from a canon printer that refused to print claiming the ink tray was full and could not be emptied.  I don't recall buying a disposable printer so they can get f'd.

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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My old printer doesn't print very well anymore and I'm not going to replace it. For shipping labels, I just use a thermal printer now, and for the rare times I need to print documents, I just go to my local library to print them for, like, a 15 cents. Printers under $150 just are not worth purchasing.

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It's bad enough when a printer laughs at you for daring to want to print a black and white text document while the cyan tank is dye, but refusing to scan?  God damn.

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I dont know if cheap film cameras have ever been a thing in the west. Basically they come with about 36 shots in a plastic casing and once you've used them all, you bring it to the shop and pick the ones you want to have printed out.

 

Canon should do something like this instead, cheap printing devices that is only good for say, 50 pages of document and no more.

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Yeah not only canon, i had a HP monotone all in one, a cheap one, when the ink empty, it refuses to scan, the ink cost 50% of the printer, since i assume it depreciate more than 50%, it's more economical to just buy a new one. And i went to a xerox - refillable - laser all in one for $300, HP just lost a customer.

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21 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

I dont know if cheap film cameras have ever been a thing in the west. Basically they come with about 36 shots in a plastic casing and once you've used them all, you bring it to the shop and pick the ones you want to have printed out.

Disposable cameras were definitely a thing here. I remember using them on holidays as a kid.

Thankfully cheap point and click digital cameras became a thing, then mobile phones with half decent cameras.

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Yeah hope Canon looses on this one.

Printer manufacturers have been getting away with way too much stuff over the years, and this is specially egregious since ink eventually dries, so its almost like a soft subscription "service".
 

When I bought a laser printer, I kept my old ink printer to use as upstairs scanner, now I am wondering if it also has this "feature" or if it might be old enough they didn't think about it yet.

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46 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Disposable cameras were definitely a thing here. I remember using them on holidays as a kid.

Thankfully cheap point and click digital cameras became a thing, then mobile phones with half decent cameras.

They were a thing, and a fun source of pseudo-tazer level capacitors when they were disposed of.

 

That said, inkjet printers being made are absolute garbage across-the-board has been a thing since the 90's. All that's improved since then is that low-cost laser printers leapfrogged them.

 

Multifunction scanner/printer/fax devices have been a thing since the 90's, but they used to cost hundreds of dollars, and all that's really changed since then is USB 2.0 support. The scanners are the same, cheap, low-quality ones. You can buy $50-$100 scanners that leapfrog the multifunction devices, including leapfrogging multi-thousand dollar canon/xerox printers that you have to lease. 

 

Ultimately, nobody should be printing anything anymore that isn't a legal/financial document that multiple people have sign-off on. Printing photos on an inkjet results in photos that last 5 years and then they're faded. I don't think it's been possible to get actual "photo"'s developed anymore, and especially if you had old APS-C kit. (I have a bunch of these, and I'm going to have to break the containers to retrieve the negatives to scan them.) 

 

At any rate, Most "24-hour photo" places have also disappeared, along with the photo departments in places that had them. And all they've done since the early 2000's is print them on their own inkjet printers (called a "dry minilab".) Given, digital cameras have also made it so that you pick and choose what you actually want to print if you print it at all, or use it on a digital-photo-frame.

 

Cameraphones still produce inferior photos, particularly indoor photos, to digital still cameras and DSLR's. I don't see this ever changing without phones doubling in thickness.

 

There is one canon LiDE scanner at the office I was doing work at, that only had Windows Vista drivers, and I coerced the computer to be able to scan using drivers for another model. It still works, and this is just proving the point that many support decisions made by canon are deliberate.

 

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HP printers do this exact thing as well. My old Photosmart 6520 suffered death by printhead recently and I replaced it with a Brother laser printer. No scanner unfortunately but I’ll take that over an inkjet any day. 

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My HP has never done this, but am wanting to invest in a laser printer eventually.

Vans UltraRange EXO SE

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2 hours ago, mr moose said:

This is why I have a brother tank printer,  straight from the box it allows me to refill with whatever ink I want and won;t stop printing in black when the color is low.

 

I switched to it from a canon printer that refused to print claiming the ink tray was full and could not be emptied.  I don't recall buying a disposable printer so they can get f'd.

Please teach me your ways oh wise one.

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18 minutes ago, thechinchinsong said:

Please teach me your ways oh wise one.

https://www.brother.com.au/en/products/all-printers/printers/mfc-j6530dw

 

This range from brother (they come in a4 too) have ink cartridges that do not contain electronics and are not attached to the print head. So when they run low you can refill them straight from bottles of ebay ink.  

 

EDIT: hang on I might have that wrong.  It has to use the LC40 and LC73 ink cartridges to be refillable.  but this is definitely the style of printer that takes them.

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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Going back 10 or 15 years when I worked in IT repair and retail the shop I worked at sold these stupidly cheap and flimsy Epson printers (genuinely not joking, it was common for customers to rip parts off them as they were pulling them out of the box), IIRC they cost something like £20.

 

A full set of replacement inks for it were something like £45. It was literally cheaper to throw the entire thing away and buy a new one than to buy 4 new ink cartridges.

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It's shit like this that is the reason I haven't owned a printer for nearly 10 years. It's like printer manufactures are pushing our paperless future. Are home printers still really rubbish with drivers too?

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7 minutes ago, mr moose said:

https://www.brother.com.au/en/products/all-printers/printers/mfc-j6530dw

 

This range from brother (they come in a4 too) have ink cartridges that do not contain electronics and are not attached to the print head. So when they run low you can refill them straight from bottles of ebay ink.  

 

 

The only problem with this style of printer is that it tends to burn through more ink as it needs to self-clean more over time. Not generally an issue until ink clogs the nozzles from non-use, and you have to make it do test prints repeatedly. 

 

That said, if you actually print enough to justify a Multifunction Color Laser, Brother makes "Brother MFCL3710CW Digital Colour All-in-One Multifunction Centre" (around $450$ CAD) and similar units. Laser printer drums last for 18,000 pages, and a toner cartridge is 1400 pages B&W (1300 color) (usually rated at 5% coverage.) The toner carts are all $100 each though (there are higher-capacity models.) So at 10 cents per page, that's usually a steal compared to inkjets. Note that this model is actually criticized in reviews as being "too expensive for toner."

 

https://downloads.canon.com/nw/printer/misc-pages/print-speed-methodology/pdfs/MG6320_page_yield_V1.0.pdf

Compare that to the inkjet in the OP. The printer costs $150 new in 2014-2019, and the ink tanks cost $22 each and you need 5 of them, and they get "maybe" 330 pages. So do the math and it comes out to four ink tanks to equal one toner cartridge, coming in at slightly less than the laser printer, once you take into account the price of the printer. However these are not apples to apples comparisons. Photo printing only gets you 168 with the inkjet (assuming you used all new ink tanks) and that makes it nearly twice the cost of the laser printer. Given laser printers don't always produce great color photos either, since glossy photo paper usually can not be used.

 

For reference, I still use my Canon PIXMA MP150 from 2006, and don't remember what year I last purchased an ink tank. I have a separate nice Epson scanner just for photos, negatives and slides. The Canon gets used for scanning documents (mostly legal stuff.) The reason I remember the date, is because I bought it as a package with the 2006 MacMini.

 

 

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9 minutes ago, Kisai said:

The only problem with this style of printer is that it tends to burn through more ink as it needs to self-clean more over time. Not generally an issue until ink clogs the nozzles from non-use, and you have to make it do test prints repeatedly. 

 

 

 

 

When the ink from ebay is literally 1/100th the price that is not a problem.  Also I've had mine for 8 years now and often it goes over 6 months without printing anything and I haven't had clogged nozzles.

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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Fuck em all. I always recommend HP inkjet printer over Canon to customer because it can run in single cartridge mode and doesn't have an absorber counter.

 

Also a waste tank shouldn't cost like >$30, it's literally a trash can/box inside your printer. 

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Good! They deserve every negativity coming to them, with their anti consumer tactics like this and complete lack of care for the environment with their overpriced ink cartridge that barely holds any ink at all while costing an arm and a leg more than a new printer.

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12 hours ago, poochyena said:

My old printer doesn't print very well anymore and I'm not going to replace it. For shipping labels, I just use a thermal printer now, and for the rare times I need to print documents, I just go to my local library to print them for, like, a 15 cents. Printers under $150 just are not worth purchasing.

Who even really prints these days? Like pretty much everything is online. Plus, let's give our libraries a visit, they're getting quite lonely down there.

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