I recently received a Samsung CL 315 color laser printer as a hand-me-down and I tried to fire it up. It turns out the issue with this printer is that 2 of the color toner cartidges are “empty”, I pulled the cartridges out and they clearly have toner left in them. Since the printer thinks that these two cartridges are empty it refuses to print even black and white (greyscale) documents. No amount of playing around with the printer or the drivers has convinced the printer to spit anything other toner empty error messages, and web searches for hacks to re-enable the printer have come up flat, thus in bold large type I call out
Shame On You Samsung
There is no good reason that this printer which has a full black toner cartridge can’t continue to print in greyscale mode if the color tanks are empty. I do understand that this problem is not limited to just Samsung, but this is the most expensive printer I’ve run across that does it. If this printer did print with remaining toner and didn’t have software that holds remaining toner hostage I’d gladly buy replacement cartridges as I need them. Since I can’t even get this printer to spit out a single page there is no bloody way I’m going to shell out a hundred or more dollars just to test if the printer functions at all.
Now, what is probably a perfectly fine printer will be dropped off at the recyclers, from where it will be shipped all the way across the Pacific to be ground up and have a fraction of it turned in to your next piece of crap electronic doodad, all thanks to some group of idiots at Samsung that think extortion of customers via printer software is an acceptable business model.
Right now I’m pretty pissed about this and I got the printer for free, imagine the cumulative anger ’round the world of all those out there that laid down their own banknotes to buy this printer only to have their inital investment held hostage by a little bit of firmware.
Did I already mention