Control, Print

Some things are just harder than they should be.

We brought our printer and some replacement cartridges to India with us, and we've just used up one of the ink colours. It would be an easy thing, you might think, to buy replacement printer cartridges for an HP printer, if you went to an HP shop with the product number. You might think this, but you'd be wrong, terribly wrong. They have never heard of ink cartridge number 363. So you go home, search on the web, and find that in India, ink cartridge number 363 is sold as number 801. Fine, you think, and go back to the HP shop and purchase your replacement magenta cartridge, number 801. Unfortunately, your HP printer, because it was bought in Britain, does not want to play nicely with foreigners, and rejects this absolutely identical in every way cartridge. You can take your printer aside, tell it that kind of behaviour's not nice, but after a short while, you just have to face facts - your printer is a racist. You might think you can get around this embarrassing problem by ordering some cartridges from the UK, but that's not going to work either. Because those cartridges will never make it to your door, having been stolen by someone in the Indian postal service. This will annoy you no end, especially as the thief won't get any benefit from his wrong doings, for the 363 cartridges, even though they're identical in every way to the 801's, won't work in Indian bought printers. Online troubleshooting forums say there is a region code attached to the printer and the cartridges and we may be able to "re-region" our printer so it modifies its inappropriate racist behaviour. But we don't know how complicated this is, and whether we can modify it back on our return to Britain. And while we're trying to sort this out the printer won't work at all, not even print in greyscale because we're out of magenta. Truly, should it be this hard?

Thankfully, after three days of visits to the HP shop at Galleria, we discover, upstairs, tucked around the corner, a Cartridge World shop. The owner not only understands our problem, but has a solution. He can refill our existing cartridges with HP ink. He says HP want us to buy new cartridges (more money for them), so they don't mention this easier, significantly cheaper and more environmentally friendly option. Naughty HP. So it's not just the printer's behaviour that needs to be worked on.