WHINE TIME!

In February, just before finding out I would be moving to Australia, Vince and I purchased a brand new all-in-one printer from Hewlett-Packard – the HP Photosmart Premium C309g, to be specific. No complaints, it worked swell. Being a brand new purchse we decided to pay the extra money it cost to ship the thing over to Australia with us, rather than get a crappy second-hand price for the old one, and fork out fresh for a new one in Aus.

Which was a fabulous idea – until this week. The ink has run out in all cartridges. I made a note of the information and went to Dick Smith to buy new ink. None of the cartridges in the store said “364″ on them, but the “564″s said they were compatible with the C309g, and the Dick Smith employee was more than happy to sell them to us as replacement ink for our printer.

I installed them tonight, only to be told by my printer that they are incompatible. A quick google later and I discover that HP – for some reason – lock their ink by region. The cartridge is the same, the ink is the same, the microchip on the cartridge is not: it just tells my printer to sod off.

I can apparently phone HP’s Customer Service line and be talked through the long process of regionalising* my printer. Unfortunately this requires me installing all of the HP software on my PC, and having this printer attached to it via a weird  USB-printer cable. This is probably my fault, but since it’s a wireless printer and we were saving space in our shipping, any printer cables we had got thrown out. It’s a wireless printer! It’s why we bought it!

Problem number two with this solution is that their offices are only open during normal working hours, when I am at work; Not sitting at home with the printer.

My other options are to get Mum to buy ink for me and ship it over – but this means waiting a few weeks to be able to print, plus the fact that the $90 I spent at Dick Smith on ink will be wasted. Or buy a new printer. But that’s what they WANT you to do.

I’m sure they have their reasons for doing this – but pissing off their customers is the price they pay for it. I will no longer purchase HP products in the future, for fear of similar dumb-fuckery.

* Worth noting that while this regionalisation is possible, it is only possible up to 3 times. Not an issue since by the time I’m living in another region I’ll have bought a printer by one of their competitors. But still pretty annoying just for the principle.

Additional: In googling for the region issue, I found out that the microchip are also expiry locked – if you’re still using them past the date at which HP think you should have been out to buy more ink, they’ll just stop working anyway, even if they are full. Which may explain why all 5 of my cartiridges became ‘empty’ all at once anyway.