HP2000C: End of the Era
Back in September 2002, I detailed my experiences with a Hewlett-Packard HP2000C inkjet printer. I managed to keep that hulk limping along for another four years, swapping parts cannibalized from three printers sent by another disgruntled HP customer. After the ensuing Frankenprinter obliterated a pair of brand-new printheads (which I bought in the vain hope that it would continue working), I decided that enough was enough.
These printers rated rather low in customer satisfaction, at least to judge from the many despairing messages in various user forums over the years. The drivers for Windows XP and Linux provide bare-bones functionality that reduce debugging to blindly trying new ink cartridges and printheads at $30+ a pop. If the failure reoccurred, well, the problem must be in the printer. Unfortunately, the printer could erroneously mark the consumables "invalid" so they would not work in any other HP2000C printer.
The printer's mechanical design has a weak spot that exacerbates the problem. An ink pump inside each cartridge, powered by cam-driven plungers in the printer's ink station, moves fluid through the long tubes from the pump station to the printheads. Four stout tension springs maintain pressure on the plungers.
As shown in Figure 1, the springs were stout enough to rip their anchor pylons right out of the base plate or snap off the little hooks at the top. This could be due to an overestimate of the plastic's strength or an overoptimistic stress calculation. Such problems should be familiar to any software designer, although the notion of incorrect numeric results might be novel.
In any event, the mechanical failure presents itself as an empty ink cartridge, with replacement cartridges becoming empty almost immediately after insertion. The firmware's error codes do not include "Mechanical failure" because, obviously, there's no way for it to detect such a thing. Arriving at the correct diagnosis could use up many perfectly good cartridges.
Of course, my printer's plastic first failed a few months out of warranty and again a year or so later. Being that sort of bear, I repaired the fractures with liberal doses of epoxy and aluminum sheet. Most customers aren't willing to do that, however, and I suspect many simply scrapped out their printer rather than returning it to the HP repair center.
The lesson to be learned from this is that your gadget's design must keep the user's interests in mind, even during abnormal conditions that you never expected. Firmware has a very limited worldview and should not make irrevocable decisions that impose economic hardship on your customers.
The entire justification for putting logic chips into ink tanks and printheads seems to boil down to forcing customers to buy replacements directly from the OEM. It seems to me that bad ink won't damage the printer in any way that can't be cured with a new printhead, which they'd surely buy from that same OEM anyway. That may be a justifiable business plan, but the firmware should never, ever destroy the function of new consumables based on problems that lie elsewhere.
While it's entirely possible that HP's current-production Business Inkjet 2300 has more sensible internal logic and better mechanical stability, I'll never know for sure. The HP2000C has pretty much destroyed my confidence in HP's legendary high-quality engineering.
Drop me a note if you can use a box of HP No. 10 ink cartridges, a bunch of dead No. 10 printheads, and four nearly full pints of refill ink. If you can use some (presumably dead) HP2000C printers, too, I have a stockpile. First responses before July 2006 get first pick, you pay shipping, and nothing's guaranteed to be anything in particular.
Reentry Checklist
IEEE Spectrum regularly reports on power system issues at www.spectrum.ieee.org.
The Marx Brothers' "Why a Duck" skit from Cocoanuts may remind you of some recent legal shenanigans. Find it at archaeology.about.com/blmarx.htm.
More on Wordstar at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordstar and WordPerfect at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordperfect.
