A Georgia woman has sued Hewlett-Packard Co. claiming their ink printer cartridges are secretly programmed to expire on a certain date, in some cases rendering them useless before they are even installed in a printer, or at least before they are empty. They are seeking a class-action suit to be filed on behalf of all the consumers in the US that purchased an HP Ink jet printer. According to Reuters,
HP ink cartridges use a chip technology to sense when they are low on ink and advise the user to make a change. But the suit claims those chips also shut down the cartridges at a predetermined date regardless of whether they are empty. “The smart chip is dually engineered to prematurely register ink depletion and to render a cartridge unusable through the use of a built-in expiration date that is not revealed to the consumer,” the suit said.