Piece of Junk Lexmark Printer

As many of us are getting ready to celebrate the biggest consumer oriented holiday of the year, I thought I would make a post about one of my biggest ever purchase mistakes.

This is a 2 year old ‘all-in-1’ Lexmark printer with a built in scanner, soon to be discarded as a piece of junk.

It’s one thing to buy a printer of reasonable quality, and use it until it wears out after several years of normal use, to be replaced with newer technology.  It’s a totally different thing to be in a position like me of throwing away a relatively new appliance, in pretty good condition, because it was designed from the beginning to be obsolete and to intentionally become unreasonably expensive to operate.

As consumers we really need to reject products like this!

Chipped Ink Cartridges

Unknown to me when I bought this printer, Lexmark chips their ink cartridges in order to ensure other companies can’t make inexpensive generic alternatives and consumers can’t refill them.  A lot of printer companies do this, but Lexmark’s whole business model revolves around selling you a cheap printer, and ripping you off with ink cartridge replacements!

To begin with this printer uses an above average amount of ink, black plus 3 colors.  All these cartridges have an electronic chip in them that must be present or the printer will not function.  In addition, the printer tracks the amount of ink used, and when it ‘thinks’ the cartridge is empty you are forced to replace it, regardless of how full it is.

Along with this, Lexmark markets several series of physically identical cartridges, with different model numbers and chips.  Their more expensive printers use cheaper cartridges, and the cheaper printers use more expensive cartridges.  Even though these ink cartridges are identical, the chips keep you from installing the wrong model number for your printer.

On the Internet you can find a number of workarounds.  Moving the chips from one cartridge to another, cycling the power on the printer 5 or 6 times to make it ‘forget’ it’s already used a particular cartridge, and so on.  In the end, none of these worked for me, and all the suggestions did was cause me to buy slightly cheaper cartridges, incorrectly making me think I could make them work.  More wasted money on purchased junk to be thrown away.

Scanner

One of the reasons for getting this model was the scanner, in order to email and post documents.

As it turns out, the version of Adobe’s pdf software it uses to generate pdf files is incompatible with Apple computers.  It’s known the relationship between Adobe and Apple haven’t been good for a long time, but given the above mentioned constraints on this printer, you have to assume the reason this version of pdf is installed is intentional.

Do you remember a few years ago, when Microsoft promoted the used of Word documents in emails?  In this case the recipient couldn’t read them unless they had a current version of office on their computer.  It was intended to frustrate non-Microsoft users as well as those using older versions of Windows.  This is clearly the same idea, intended to frustrate Apple users as well as make me want to buy an upgraded printer.

Finished

So I’ve had enough buying ripoff cartridges and pretending it’s okay that Apple users can’t read my pdfs.  It’s time to throw the printer away.  I will never buy another Lexmark product, and indeed be suspicious of any store that even sells them.

Spread the word!