HPR4552: Printer Conspiracy

Hosted by MrX on 2026-01-13 00:00:00

---

HPR Comments

---

Antoine says: Yep

RE: hpr4552::2026-01-13 Printer Conspiracy by MrX
00:07:02 Listen in ogg, opus, or mp3 format.
Uhum, Epson releases (or released) their printers drivers interested in making money even if it means artificially hindering the work you need it to and which it could do.

I had an Epson Stylus CX4500. The official driver would not print, simply couldn't force to try, if it detected the ink cartridge was empty.

That means, not only you could not force it to try: it would not print a 100% yellow document if it though, and pointed, the only black cartridge was empty.

There was a little device you could buy online, used to reset a cartridge. It had 3 pins that you used to touched the 3 little metal areas of an "empty" Epson cartridge (of that model) to reset its identification to the printer — a "resetter" of cartridge. I bought, and after this procedure, I would put again the same cartridge (without even shaking, no mechanical idea to help, only deceiving the printer with the resetter); and the CX4500, with its official driver, read the cartridge as if it was full. And did the work with the previously "empty" cartridge. For at least 40 or 50 pages.

I searched now, the CX4500 is from 2004; I used it for years, at least until 2020, but, using only a little, even with cheap and good quality third-party cartridges, I faced the clogging you mentioned, not worth using weekly only to avoid the problem; so I abandoned it (I think it is by here somewhere, maybe would work after a little maintenance).

To the end: official driver support ended when I eventually updated Windows, would not work under it. But I had dual-boot, and it worked flawlessly in Linux. Without need of the reseter, because the open source driver was only interested in serving the best it could, no deceiving.

Nice content, and audio and voice. Thanks for the show, MrX!

Mastodon Comments