Canon printer recognizes ink cartridges as fake: Talking Tech podcast – USA TODAY

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below.This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
More:Daily news, true crime, and more USA TODAY podcasts
Hey there listeners. It’s Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech now is probably not the best time to be the owner of a Canon printer. Apparently because of the semiconductor chip shortage, Canon is having to help a bunch of customers that are upset because its own ink cartridges are malfunctioning on their printers. And they’re recognizing these cartridges as fake. One of my colleagues writes about this in a story that you can read on tech.USAtoday.com. There was a big outcry on social media. Canon printers, basically what was happening is they couldn’t confirm that the Canon branded ink cartridges that work with those printers were actually official. They were recognized as fake and therefore they didn’t work. And a big reason for this is that the chips that Canon uses to verify them are in such short supply. So imagine you have a Canon printer, you go to buy a Canon ink cartridge, you pop it in and the printer keeps telling you it doesn’t work because it’s not a real Canon cartridge.
Yeah, not fun. Meanwhile, Canon has had to tell its customers how to bypass an override this digital rights management tool that allows them to use their ink cartridges. They used this previously so that any other cartridge brand, other than Canon wouldn’t function on these printers, the German branch of Canon issued a public statement on its website. It explained that due to the lack of semiconductor chips, official Canon ink was being misread in the printers as counterfeit. A total of 19 different printer models have been impacted by this, which is why now you have Canon telling people to do perform this work around. There are instructions on Canon’s official website that outline how and why to ignore the warnings that were in place before that forbid customers from using non-Canon ink cartridges. This is all tied, of course, to the semiconductor chip shortage. We’ve seen this affect so many different products, video games, computers, cars.
They really have put a hamper on the tech industry in a lot of other industries. But I can’t imagine being a Canon printer owner. This has to be so frustrating. For myself personally, I don’t have a can printer, but my biggest gripe was always buying a cartridge and then using it for whatever the task was and then not using it again for a few months and then trying it again and turns out the ink doesn’t work. And then I have to go buy another cartridge. And it’s just… I thought that was a pain. This sounds not fun at all. And hopefully it’s something that gets fixed very soon. We’ll see what happens and we’ll keep you up to date on that. Make sure to go to tech.USAtoday.com for the latest on all this.
Listeners let’s hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas? Any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter @BrettMolina23. I want to give a special shout out real quick before we go to Mark Galvin. He is someone that reached out on Twitter. He talked about a recent episode I did, talking about remotes and how I want CES to please figure out remotes and remote finders. Come on. He had a really interesting comment about streaming services and how they make it so hard to get local TV. But not only that, the services don’t really go straight to a TV channel. You know how with cable, you turn on your cable box and there’s just TV happening. With something like a YouTube TV or Sling or something else, you turn it on and it goes to a guide and then you have to fumble around to find something you want.
Really interesting perspective and I’m surprised there isn’t an option for that, where if you turn on the app, it’ll take you to the last thing you were watching and just have it on like regular TV. And then if you wanted to go to the guide, you could. So yeah, really fascinating. Hopefully it’s something that YouTube TV ads or other streaming live streaming services, but we’ll see what happens, but I wanted to shout out Mark. Thanks again for the great comment. Always appreciated. And again, if you comment to me on Twitter, I might read it on an episode. So there you go. Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You’ve been listening to Talking Tech. We’ll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.

source