[2006] Expired HP inkjets

Does anyone know if you purchase HP ink jets past their expiration but box unopened --what should I expect. They have been stored in a dry smoke free closet so the Ebayer states. I've read a few reviews online but was wondering if any Tuggers has some experience or thoughts on this subject

Re: Expired HP inkjets

I would think they would still be OK if the foil wrapper is intact -- but I use the "Universal Inkjet Refill Kit" - works great!

(For ebay purchases always use credit card funded paypal)

Re: Expired HP inkjets

I've used expired HP ink, and it was fine, no problems. How old is it? Mine was about a year past.
Marsha

Re: Expired HP inkjets

As HP printers have the print head built into the cartridge, the worst that can happen is the cartridge won't work because the ink has dried out.
Give them a try as you have nothing to lose.

Re: Expired HP inkjets

This may sound really out there but for some reason my printer will not use expired hp inkjet cartridges.

I was printing along just fine and the next day I kept getting errors about my print cartridge. Well I had a pack of two so I thought my cartridge was low etc so I changed them and I still got the same error. So after about 3 hours of getting totally noting done except for giving myself a huge headache I called my computer person. He came out and looked at the printer and cleaned it up and all all the tests etc he could but nothing would solve the problem. Well he happened to have to more brand new ink cartridges so we swapped them out with the new ones that I had replaced yesterday and the printer worked just fine. We looked on the box and yes the cartridges had expired. He said that he also has a printer that will not use expired cartridges

I have a HP Deskjet 832C, because of this I only buy one cartridge at a time now. Before I would buy 3 or 4 just so I would have them on hand but after having to throw 4 cartridges away because they were expired I've learned my lesson. Now in our office we have 3 different printers all different HP models and mine is the only one where the expiration date is an issue.

Re: Expired HP inkjets

I've heard about some HP printers not "allowing" expired ink cartridges to be used, even if they are fresh, have ink, etc. I've also heard that you can bypass this, if you really need to, by changing the system date on your computer to a date before the ink's expiration. Of course, that will mess with your file system, if that matters, but it *is* a work around.

There are some other solutions here.

Fern

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Two of them are late 2004 and the other is March 2005. I won the auction at $15.23 for all three. If one works out of the three --I will feel feel fine I suppose.

Re: Expired HP inkjets

I had this problem about a year ago with some very old hp ink cartridges I had from my office. Oddly enough there are a bunch of home remedies that use hot water to "loosen" up the ink and make old cartidges work. There are a bunch of different threads out there that explain the procedure to use. I could not make it work but many folks were successful. I can't remember the searches I used but I got a lot of hits on this problem and there are several remedies that evidently are pretty successful.

Re: Expired HP inkjets

It is far more likely that the reason an old cartridge won't work is because the ink has dried on the heads than that HP have included some technology on the printers to read the date off a bar code or similar. I have never seen anything in HP documentation to suggest this and would certainly have expected to hear screaming from the rooftops it it was actually the case.

Re: Expired HP inkjets

All I can say is that HP is getting darnright crafty regarding their printers, and I think that the other poster was correct, it "reads" the printer cartridge's date. Personally, I think this should be outlawed. Furthermore, I recommend that you don't buy offbrand ink cartridges. I purchased a bunch of them from Target (on clearance) and none of them worked (now I know why they were on clearance!). Consumer Reports did a story on ink cartridges and said that most of them don't work as well as the recommended manufacturers cartridges. (Mine didn't work at all....)

Dell printers are the worst though. You can ONLY buy dell print cartridges from Dell -- and they are never on sale and are way too expensive.

It is true that sometimes it is cheaper to buy a new printer that comes with cartridges than it is to buy the cartridge by itself!

Katherine

Fern Modena said:

I've heard about some HP printers not "allowing" expired ink cartridges to be used, even if they are fresh, have ink, etc. I've also heard that you can bypass this, if you really need to, by changing the system date on your computer to a date before the ink's expiration. Of course, that will mess with your file system, if that matters, but it *is* a work around.

There are some other solutions here.

Fern

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Fern, is correct in the above post. The printer message will display: expired ink cartridge. Cut your print off and reboot. It should work.

Anybody notice this is a 5 year-old thread? Still valid info? Jim

Yes, it's an old thread, but still valid info.....

I've bought old cartridges for old printers and they've been fine - HP and others.

If you have an old cartridge that is dried out, put it on a paper towel soaked with the solution that comes with ink-refill kits. I'm not sure if it's a cleaning solution or what, but it's the bottle that is NOT ink.

One thing to consider is buying the XL cartridges if they are available for your printer. They cost a few bucks more, but have 3 times the ink capacity. These cartridges are the same size as the regular ones, but last much longer. It's almost as if they don't put much ink in the regular cartridges but the XLs are full. Just another sign of how they rip us off.

By the way, there was a class action suit against HP for their ink practices. I filed a legitimate claim, but never got a dime.

Leave it to a "guest" to reopen a five year old thread.

Nevertheless, I recently updated the firmware of my Lexmark, and suddenly, I could not replace a cartridge using a knock-off brand anymore. Not even transferring a chip from an empty "original" helped. Somehow, it knew which was "genuine" and which was an imitation.

KProuty said:

All I can say is that HP is getting darnright crafty regarding their printers, and I think that the other poster was correct, it "reads" the printer cartridge's date. Personally, I think this should be outlawed. Furthermore, I recommend that you don't buy offbrand ink cartridges. I purchased a bunch of them from Target (on clearance) and none of them worked (now I know why they were on clearance!). Consumer Reports did a story on ink cartridges and said that most of them don't work as well as the recommended manufacturers cartridges. (Mine didn't work at all....)

Dell printers are the worst though. You can ONLY buy dell print cartridges from Dell -- and they are never on sale and are way too expensive.

It is true that sometimes it is cheaper to buy a new printer that comes with cartridges than it is to buy the cartridge by itself!

Katherine

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You are correct. They do hard code it into the printers now notmto allow use of "expired" cartridges. Because of that, and the overall high cost of ink jet's, I have changed my own printers to LaserJets, both color and black & white, and do not recommend ink jets at all unless people fully understand how expensive the ink is & the crazy stuff they are doing making them even more costly to the end user.

I talked to the guy who headed up the group in HP who invented the ink jet cartridge. He said the whole ink jet concept is a money tree. A tanker truck shows up and they add a little ink to each cartridge. Money from heaven!

I rarely use my inkjet printer and always buy refilled cartridges. I get far more ink than that in the manufacturer's new cartridge....and much less costly. Still a ripoff tho.

My next printer will be a B/W laser.
I only need color for photos, and those I can get cheap enuff from online merchants.

Passepartout said:

Anybody notice this is a 5 year-old thread? Still valid info? Jim

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The thread was revived from the dead by a spammer. The spam has been deleted now. Do these spammers really do Google searches to find old forum threads to post to? I guess so.

Yep - a spammer.

Talent312 said:

My next printer will be a B/W laser.
I only need color for photos, and those I can get cheap enuff from online merchants.

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I would agree. There is no need to print photos on a printer. The cost of paper and ink is likely the same if not more than ordering through Snapfish, Shutterfly or another online vendor. The quality will be far and above just about anything a ink jet will produce.

We just picked up an HP B&W laser for $99. We just print documents every now and then. So we don't need anything fancy. The toner cartridges are about three times the cost, but they also print three times the number of pages. The quality is also better.

The only problem we have now is that we don't have a wireless router, so I have connected the laptops to the printer via an adhoc wireless network. So every time the PC restarts I have to reconnect to the printer manually as Windows won't permit automatic connection to adhoc networks . I tried a couple work around I found on the web, but they didn't seem to work.

dioxide45 said:

The only problem we have now is that we don't have a wireless router, so I have connected the laptops to the printer via an ad hoc wireless network. So every time the PC restarts I have to reconnect to the printer manually...

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I'm not sure how someone can live w/o a wireless router, these days.

We hard-wired our printer to a wireless router (ignoring its wireless capability), put its printer-driver on every 'puter in the house, and simply "see" it whenever connected our household-LAN.

The only issue is that, after so many hours of inactivity, the thing shits itself off, and I only discover this when my next print job gets lost in the "ether."

Talent312 said:

The only issue is that, after so many hours of inactivity, the thing shits itself off

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That could get messy.

MichaelColey said:

That could get messy.

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The wrong typo to make. Whoops

Talent312 said:

I'm not sure how someone can live w/o a wireless router, these days.

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It isn't always easy and having wireless would be convenient sometimes. However, a couple years ago we had a problem with our wireless router. Either it went bad or we were getting interference (new neighbor moved in and I think they have wireless also). At that time I opted to just run a few wires through the home and now we connect everything via Cat5/6. Much more reliable and easier to diagnose. If we want to use one of the laptops in a room that doesn't have an outlet we have a power adapter we can use as long as we have a power outlet.

Our new printer also doesn't have a wired network connection. Not many new consumer printers do any more. Just the wireless connection and USB.