This is a petty annoyance with a more serious point behind it. I’ve had the joy (ahem) of working for a few places with fairly beefy printers connected to networks serving say a couple of dozen people, and so were under fairly constant use. I shall keep the manufacturer’s name under my hat for now - suffice to say they’re a big brand, reputable company which you will all have heard of - but I suspect the following practice is probably fairly widespread.
After a few weeks use, the little status display screen on the top would switch to something along the lines of “fuser unit 2317 pages remaining - order replacement part”. 2317 pages remaining until what? Is it going to self-destruct? Explode in a cloud of magenta toner dust? It’s obviously an artificial countdown, as to predict the failure of a component that precisely would require some seriously complicated monitoring equipment which would obviously be far too expensive to include in your average office printer.
What actually happens when the countdown reaches zero is... nothing. The printer just sits there blinking “replace fuser unit”, and refuses to do anything else until you comply. After the prerequisite bureaucracy and stressed budget balancing, some 3rd party printer servicing bloke appears to replace the part, has a look at the old one, and reckons it’s still got at least a couple of hundred thousand more pages worth of use left in it. You can’t reset the counter manually, and the printer recognises if you try and put the old one back in.
So does that imply that the printer company have actually gone to the trouble of putting counters in individual components, just so that they can extort another £250 (or whatever price it is) out of you for a replacement for a part that didn’t actually need replacing? Not only have they thought “we can make some money out of spare parts”, but they’ve sunk to the base level of designing in bogus lifetime counters so that the end user will think “I’ve spent 3 grand on a nice colour laser printer - I can’t afford to not buy these spare bits to get it up and running again”, and effectively holding departments hostage until the ransom gets paid. Outrageous behaviour! I can’t understand how reputable companies are allowed to get away with such a blatant scam! And what an utter pointless waste of resources. Yes, regular maintenance is good, but don’t use that as cover for your greed.
As a final peeve, I’d like to wonder out loud about all that used office equipment that gets shipped off under “re-use” schemes to developing countries after businesses upgrade their kit. Are these final end users, relying on donations of useful second-hand-but-serviceable equipment going to be able to afford a new unnecessary replacement for a part that doesn’t need replacing? Are they going to be impressed when their shiny new printer manages a measly couple of thousand pages and then sits there blinking? No. Shame on you.
2 comments:
Actually you have two complaints here. The first, about individual cartridges, is probably justified, but it might not be. Depending on the design of the printer it may be difficult to keep nozzles from drying out unless there's ink in the reservoir or the print head stays safely docked. If the manufacturer lets you print with a dry cartridge you may be risking the printer breaking down and that's not good for them or you.
The same kind of issue arises with the bigger printer. The makers are actually very good at predicting failure of components, but there's a probability curve involved. They know, given engineering tolerances, that, say, only 0.01% of fusers will fail before printing 100,000 pages. Some will print 200,000, but most will fail somewhere in between. If they tell you to change the fuser at 100,000 pages they can be sure that their printer will always be working when you want to print and they won't have to deal with the support calls from people complaining that their printer isn't reliable.
It's very like the planned preventive maintenance stuff that many concerns employ - I came across it when I worked in a hospital - you track how things deteriorate and replace them before they go. Bulbs and batteries are the usual things, but I'm sure there are others.
HTH to reduce the frustration a little.
Yes, I take the point on failure prediction by probabilities - though interestingly one of the guys who came to fix one of them, and worked with the printer companies all the time, basically said they set the thresholds deliberately low to make you buy replacements more often.
I don't mind the "replace part" message on its own. It's the fact that it just stops dead and doesn't let you use it that's the problem. Surely once the warning is delivered it's the user's responsibility to get the part replaced as they see fit - at that stage the printer company has already covered its behind.
Back to our printer: the nozzle/print head/cartridge are all a single unit, so when it's done you replace it, in which case it doesn't really matter what happens to the empty one, or you can get it refilled, in which case the trip to the shop and back will give it just as much drying-out opportunity as leaving it in the printer. It's still irritating when you just want one monochrome page and it's complaining about lack of cyan! :o)
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