Join the club. At my office we had an OfficeJet, and it "expired" a printhead. It won't even allow you to SCAN unless the printhead is replaced.

No more HP for me. Never again.

They also print advertising without your knowledge.

http://www.dailytech.com/HPs+Web+Connected+Printers+May+Prin...

That article was 6 years ago and I haven't really heard of anything about printers containing adware since then, so I suppose the amount of negative reaction that generated was enough for them to abandon the idea.

I had this exact same problem with Epson too. It's a general practice in this industry.

FWIW I had an epson printer that refused to print B&W documents until I replaced the cyan cartridge.

Fixed the problem temporarily by getting cheap chinese cartridge off ebay, but Epson is now very much on my boycott list.

I just had a Lexmark tell me cyan, yellow and magenta were low, which was fine since the document I was printing was black text with 2 exceptions for arrows where to sign in red.

It printed all the text in orange and the 2 arrows were a perfect red.

Don't forget to choose black and white mode in print job settings.

There's a setting to tell your printer to not obnoxiously use color inks to print blacks.

It's not without purpose though. It does it because printing all four colors ("registration") instead of just black makes for a deeper black (if that makes sense).

However, you don't want to use 100% registration for text as it can easily eat up your ink/toner. A good compromise if you need deeper blacks is 100% K with a bit of CMY (don't know the percentage).

I'm not discarding the idea that printer companies do it so the customer has to buy more ink; that may be somewhat true. However, even high end printers that are designed to last still do this to an extent, so it's not entirely a money grab.

If you need some inks other than black to make black, why aren't they in the black ink already?

Sometimes you don't want rich blacks, and it's easier to just use some of the CMY instead of having multiple K rollers.

That is so corrupt. HP deserve a total boycott.

How is this not a class action lawsuit?

Either (a) you most likely agreed to an arbitration clause when purchasing the printer or (b) customers don't care enough. Or both. My money is on the second one.

Customers are cheap and lazy. If their printer breaks, they go buy a new $40 one instead of doing research and finding a quality one for a few hundred. "What does this $300 laser do that this $40 inkjet doesn't!?" You mean besides last longer, actually work when you need it to, and not have nozzles that clog up?

People continuing to purchase cheap PoS printers and just accept that "printers break after a year; get a new one" is what allows this nonsense to keep happening.

Those arbitration clauses mean nothing in the EU.

what are you using now?