Lexmark Printer Cartridge hacking

[hak8or]

Edit: Taken out because I am unhappy with hackaday

[error404]

Printer companies have been doing this for a long time. Lexmark was one of the *ahem* innovators though. There was a landmark DMCA case way back in 2003 against a company making replacement chips, for example. https://www.eff.org/cases/lexmark-v-sta ... se-archive

Honestly though their products are shit regardless of the ink cartridge mess, I don't know why you would've bought one before hearing about it.

[hak8or]

Edit: Taken out because I am unhappy with hackaday

[Osgeld]

lexmark, you only need one in your lifetime!

(ok they are decent enough printers, but after owning one, ... your done)

[nes]

In their defence, their toner I found makes the best PCB etch resist. Once I found the right paper it works first time every time.

Don't know about ink cartridges but fake toner chips can be found on the ebay.

[cgimark]

Most of these chips are I2C based eeproms but can also be microprocessors. Canon for instance uses small avr chips on some of its cartridges. The problem with any of them is deciphering the encryption method used to create the data they store.

I got rid of my canon printer after fighting with it over ink cartridges, even though chips were around for refilling it just wasn't worth the effort for me.
I instead bought a brother printer that uses the LC61 series of ink refills. No chips in these, they are just containers with liquid ink inside. Refill is remove the stopper add ink, put back in printer.

[Tachikoma]

In their defence, their toner I found makes the best PCB etch resist. Once I found the right paper it works first time every time.

Don't know about ink cartridges but fake toner chips can be found on the ebay.

Hah, yah got a laser Lexmark here too. Works pretty well!

But the primary reason for getting a Lexmark is LAN support, and that they reportedly work as a reliable postscript printer in Linux.