I stumbled upon this (off-topic) question on electronics.SE
Are products designed to fail?
I have heard that some companies trick consumers into buying and replacing printers & cartridges more frequently by manipulating parts. For example, when I shake the cartridge of my printer model after a "Empty" message, I can print a lot more pages. I also found articles about lawsuits concerning this topic.
Yes, it turns out that many of the ink cartridges made by HP and Lexmark have switches in them that make the cartridges fail after a certain period of time, whether they're empty or not. This isn't just some crazy conspiracy theory, either. HP's senior "ink scientist" (yes, that's actually his real title), Nils Miller, admitted to this during an interview.
Of course, companies are allowed to produce low-quality products from a legal point of view, but alerting that the "cartridge is empty" when its consistently still half-full doesn't merelyindicate a low-quality measurement, but a obvious case of fraud. It's like a car tank having a built-in hole. But maybe it's just a legal loop-hole companies can rely on.
Are there some objective and independent studies/surveys investigating and esp. comparing models of different companies (e.g. companies selling printers)?
Do companies build cartridges in a way that they will not work with less-than-half-empty cartridge?
? I think if there are even lawsuits, there have to be some technical studies affirming this. The legality is just a side-node. The claim is that most companies do this manipulation. Also if i shake my cartridges, they are still usable, so i doubt your statement that they all just build it that way. Do you have a reference for this? – Hauser Sep 16 '11 at 14:29