I honestly thought this was a troll comment intended to show how ridiculous this sort of thing would be if region locking applied to printers. I was not pleased to find out that this is, actually, a thing.

And circumventing the "technological protection measure" is illegal under §1201 of the DMCA.

Printers aren't copyrighted, and moving a printer is not making a copy.

He is hinting a the common knowledge of what DMCA is.

it practically makes it illegal to even change the battery of a device you bought if there is not an user accessible and labeled port to change said battery.

So i am guessing that fiddling with the DRM software on the printer also is a crime under such idiot law.

My Samsung printer (ML2165W) has some similar stupidity.

I had to flash it to accept a toner bought elsewhere.

It caught me off guard, my previous laser printer (also Samsung) happily accepted other cartridges (I would have bought Samsung, but they were out of stock).

Thank you for including the model number.

I haven't turned it into a business model nor personal public initiative, yet, but I think we are to the point of needing to name and shame. And then conduct, or withhold, our business accordingly.

The manufacturers are way ahead of us here. Do you know how many model numbers the average printer manufacturer has - sometimes for the same product?

It's a byzantine mess that shifts every week or so. If you can solve this problem, you can also solve the problem of having consistent reviews for products.

If one model has consumer-hostile features, simply avoid all models from that manufacturer.

If someone makes a business of hitting me with his Buick, I don't keep their company when they come around in their Oldsmobile.

The logical solution is to fall into the arms of Apple or their equivalent in a given industry.

In many areas, Apple doesn't exist (even with a different name). Worse, sometimes they exist, but only for a brief time as the company strip-mines the goodwill that a given product has to extract more profits and then fall back to "industry rest-state".

Customer preference to control manufacturers' behavior is a model that rarely works.

Reminds me of my Brother Printer/Fax/Scanner. Once ANY of the 4 ink carts is empty, you can no longer do ANYTHING. No scanning to a SD card, no outbound faxes, etc, until you replace the ink. Of course, there is a simple "tape over the holes" hack to get around this, but it's still lame.

I haven't looked much at the color ones, but if it's networkable get it on a network and poke around in its web-based management interface. On the mono lasers there's a setting for "Toner out" behavior - the default is "stop" but you can change it to "continue".

This is disappointing -- I really like my barebones brother laser printer, I thought they might be one of the few honest printer manufacturers.

I think inkjets and lasers are basically different companies. From every vendor. The laser products just work, the inkjet products just don't.

I could not agree more. I also have a Brother Laser, and it's been rock solid for years. Inkjets were always a waste of money, ink, and time!

My Brother laser is the first printer I don't hate. Can't speak highly enough of them. And it even let me print (while throwing up a "No Ink" warning) until the pages came out blank.

Wow. This should be illegal or at least require labeling. Intentionally crippling a product in an obviously unexpected way should at least require disclosure.

Will you choose to buy HP printers in the future?

Many people move almost all the stuff they have, for example when they get a good enough relocation amount. Why even waste $50 from your pockets when you already have a good and working printer?