Editing Antifeatures (section)

=== Printers ===
==== Printer Cartridges ====

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20050222/1220232.shtml HP printers]
have been supplied with cartridges that both report 'empty' when they
have 25% ink still remaining, but also have a 'use by date' encoded into
the chip, which disables the printer cartridge if it is used after that
date (no HP printer will use it).

In general the
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkjet_printer#Underlying_business_model business model] of printer manufacturers has been to lose money on the
printer and make it on the printer cartridges.  This has caused such
antifeatures as:

* Reporting the cartridge as empty when (often substantial) ink remains.
* Microchips that will report the cartridge size by number of uses
rather than by amount of ink remaining.  These will ignore any refilling
of the cartridge.
* accepting only regionnally bought cartridges (HP zoned the world the
same way as DVD !!)

===== Lexmark =====

Lexmark also codes both printers and cartridges with region codes (a la
DVD) and
[http://support.lexmark.com/index?page=content&id=SO3581 causes their printers to fail to print with a cartridge from a different code].

Interestingly, some "compatible" printer cartridges are region-code
free, and can print with any printer, so Lexmark's engineering not only
makes things harder for their customers, but also encourages their
customers to buy from non-Lexmark vendors.

There are other features of the printer cartridge industry that are
anticompetitive (e.g. use of DMCA and patents to protect antifeature
code) but do not involve specific software or hardware - i.e. they
aren't 'antifeatures' per se.

==== no network access ====

HP's PSC-series printers came with a Windows driver that specifically
was designed to NOT allow the printer to be shared over a LAN, so as to
not cannibalize the sale of their (more expensive) network-oriented
printers.  This could be hacked around, by installing the (massive)
Windows drivers on client machines and using a Linux box as the print
server.

==== Printer Yellow Dots ====

Many printers produce a background of hard to see yellow dots on every
page. This pattern is unique to the printer and can be used to identify
the printer that produced a page.

This is not officially acknowledged by printer manufacturers, but
appears to be as a result of a shady deal between government and the
manufacturers.

See: [http://seeingyellow.com/ http://seeingyellow.com/]