Practical IT Tips: Printer companies get fat on chips. By Simon Hurst

Simon makes his point well. We have come across this problem with both HP and Xerox printers as well. It is part of the whole 'con' that printer manufacturers play on thier customers. The price of the printer is kept low to induce the sale with the manufacturer making sure that they make their profit on the consumables. When third parties try to muscle in on the overpriced consumable market then technological barriers are introduced to sustain the manufacturers' advantage. The whole market is anti competitive and such practices should be legislated against. In the meantime always check the cost and effectiveness of consumables when buying a new printer.

Used to have a similar problem with a Canon printer. This actually stopped the printer working entirely at one stage because the counter said that the number of copies done must mean that the overflow reservoir was full - it wasn't and was easy to empty in any case. The only way it would allow us to continue was to have the printer serviced. I found a piece of free software which reset the counter and, hey presto, another two years of useful life.

It may be worthwhile searching to see if you can find anything similar for your printer.

Thanks Bruce - our experience has been with Samsung, but as you mention I am sure they are far from being alone. It's a shame because apart from this toner issue I've been very impressed by the Samsung printers. I just can't believe that it's fair to prevent somebody using something that they've purchased. It's like buying a book and finding three-quarters of the pages have been glued together so you can't read them!

Thanks for the suggestion - I did do some research on the Internet. I didn't find any easy way to reset the chips in the cartridge, but did find refill cartridges with reset chips and also separate reset chips for sale. Hence my comment about possibly making it more, rather than less, likely that people would resort to refill cartridges rather than buying new 'genuine' ones. Grateful for any other ideas...

If the printer is still covered by a warrenty why not make a nuisance of yourself and call out an engineer claiming that there is a fault on the printer and it will not use the entire content of the cartridge - after all you have paid for the contents of the cartridge so you have a legal right to use them.