“The genuine HP ink cartridges, for which I paid as much as I paid for the actual printer, would not work with the printer they were designed to work with because I bought it in a different part of the world.”
Edwards paid 192 euros for the printer in the Netherlands and $207 for genuine HP cartridges after moving to the US. The fix took a couple dozen hours across five months, a secret menu, a keygen on HP’s internal site and support reps who kept asking to remote into his PC. The support chatbot’s answer was to buy the cartridges he already had or join Instant Ink. Region-locking ink has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the subscription.