US woman suing HP for premature ink cartridge expiry.When presented with a story about a US citizen suing someone or some company, I'll usually poke fun at the US and how often people sue each other there for the most frivolous of reasons -- but not this time.
A woman from the state of Georgia is suing Hewlett Packard, saying that their ink cartridges have a chip inside that tells the printer it needs a replacement cartridge, even when it does not. Sound silly? Not to me. The chip, apparently, is engineered to register early ink depletion, as well as rendering the cartridge unusable through the use of an expiration date that is hard-coded into the chip.
The lawsuit seeks to represent anyone in the US who has purchased an HP inkjet printer since February 2001.
HP, the world's biggest printer firm, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The lawsuit is asking for restitution, damages and other compensation.
Now, the reason I don't find this to be silly is the following:
Being the geek that I am, I take everything part that I can get my hands on. This includes ink cartridges. I bought a laptop in September of 2003, and it came with a free HP inkjet printer, as well as a couple of cartridges. After the first set of cartridges started to give out, and eventually stopped working altogether, I took them apart. Much to my surprise I found that the sponges were still completely soaked in ink. It was a bit odd, and I thought that it was pretty wasteful. I didn't give it a second thought.
Fast forward a few more months, and my second set of cartridges were now refusing to work, citing low-ink reasons. I opened them up as well. Same story.
All in all, I wouldn't be surprised if HP was pulling something like this. Everyone knows that the money is in the ink, not the printers. If a company as ginormous as HP can increase their profit margins in some way or another, they'll do it.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about all of this -- but I'm definitely going to keep my eyes out for this lawsuit.
Article Link: US woman sues over ink cartridges
