Ronnie Tucker

<rant>

A while ago I bought an Epson Stylus C44UX nice and cheap, £30.

Few days ago it was flashing its little red and green lights at me. I hadn’t used it for a while so I changed both the black and colour cartridges.

Still flashing red and green lights.

After some Google research it turns out that most Epson printers now have a counter built in to them. The idea being that when you’ve done x amount of print outs or used x amount of cartridges the printer effectively disables its self and signals you to take it to an Epson certified engineer to have it serviced! It signals you by flashing red and green lights. Well that’s just fan-tastic…

Turns out you can open up the printer, clean out the waste tray and sponges then run an application to try and reset the counter. That is of course assuming you have several long screw drivers and six hands to unclip the damn thing…

Screw that. The damn thing only cost me £30 and I can get another printer for that, where as I’m quite sure it’d cost me more than £30 to have the thing ’serviced’ by an Epson rep.

Whatever next: disabling hard drives because of too many write cycles?

</rant>