A Class Action Suit Fired At Canon For Tying Low Ink To Scanning

A New Way To Make You Regret Buying A Printer

The printer industry, or at least Canon, seem to have forgotten the lesson HP learned twice. It was back in 2005 when HP was originally taken to court, for programming in an expiry date to their ink cartridges to ensure that no matter how much ink remained, after a certain amount of time had passed you needed to buy a new cartridge.  After several years of legal battles, HP was forced to discontinue that practice and to reimburse affected users, up to a total of $5million in compensation.

Fast forward to earlier this year and once again HP was in court defending their practice of scanning printers to detect ink cartridges from sources other than HP and disabling them.  It is not going well for HP, and an update on the progress of this case is expected at the end of this month.  HP is also having some shareholder issues, quite possibly related in part to these legal proceedings.

However, that is enough about why Canon should know better than to do what they have done to their multi-function devices.  A Canon customer recently realized that their Pixma MG2522 printer would refuse to scan documents, because the ink levels were low on the printer.  As scanning does not require any ink, David Leacraft was rather upset at this, especially after discovering the fax function was also disabled because of low ink levels.

There is now a class action lawsuit against Canon with over 100 members, and involving 20 different models of Canon printers, with the same upper limit of $5 million in damages being sought.  It seems that some companies refuse to learn from previous experiences, either their own or their competitors.