I assume this should come as no surprise. HP continues to block Aftermarket cartridges in their Laser and Inkjet printers, even after lawsuit after lawsuit, after lawsuit, after lawsuit over their Dynamic Security feature. I’m writing this post today after one of my clients was impacted by this feature, and it lead to a service call for me to look at their printer.
My client uses an HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M182nw in their small business, a restaurant, where the printer is used to re-print menus on occasion, and to print out new drawable Kids menus for dine-in customers. The printer generally sees a goods amount of use, printing batches of 50 pages or so at a time. They typically use Aftermarket toner (Which is about $100 for a pack of Four), as the replacement costs for a set of four toner cartridges (Black, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow) costs approximately $270 from HP, and I’m sure will be increasing once the United States Tariff Time Bombs start to kick in. This gets them about 800-1,100 pages. The Aftermarket toner refills that you can typically buy from Wal-Mart, Amazon or other online stores, have always worked well for them and deliver the same print quality as an HP OEM Toner cartridge. In rare cases, an aftermarket toner cartridge may leak and spill excessive toner onto a page, but that’s not too common in my experience. The toner leak problem can also happen to an OEM cartridge, so it is not specific to just aftermarket toner.
When my client reached out today, they described an error message which was worded exactly like this: “Indicated cartridges blocked for containing a non-HP Chip.’ The cartridge in question? A Black toner cartridge from their inventory (their last one for a matter of fact) which was installed to replace a depleted supply. This supply was Aftermarket, and non-HP, but it shouldn’t have been blocked.
What is the chip in the cartridge used for? Per HP, this chip performs a few functions. First, it identifies the cartridge model and type in use, so the printer knows the cartridge is a Magenta installed into the Magenta slot. Printers not using Microchips can identify the supply installed using a pin hole matrix on the supply (similar to how my Brother Thermal Label Printer works to identify the paper type). The chip is also used to store Supply level information for the printer to read, and optionally, information such as the number of pages a supply printed, and whether an error occurred with a supply such as a paper jam. The pages printed tally would carry across to other printers, if a printer is set to store usage information on the cartridge rather than locally. The error and jam information is used to allow HP, when handling warranty replacement and re-manufacturing tasks for a cartridge, to improve the supply and printer hardware down the road to make printing more reliable. They collect this data via the HP Cartridge Recycling program, which can be used by anyone who purchases an HP Cartridge and needs to return a spent HP Cartridge. Just look inside the box for a prepaid mailing label to use for shipping back spent supplies if you’re looking to recycle HP cartridges, by the way.
With the chip out of the way let’s talk a bit about the HP Dynamic Security function. Dynamic Security is intended by HP to be used to lock the printer to only using cartridges produced by HP. This portion of Dynamic Security is known as “Cartridge Policy” by the Settings menu, although it can go by different terms. This can be useful in places like Print Shops where having a genuine supply means the print results will come out in a known quality. Sometimes a feature like this is needed to ensure the terms of a support contract or warranty are adhered to, to ensure that poorly made supplies are not fouling up a printer’s components such as the rollers, fuser, and paper carriage. In other instances, HP uses the Dynamic Security for more nefarious purposes by combining it with their HP Instant Ink program, a subscription service where HP can automatically send new supplies when they start to run low, but also a service which can limit the number of pages your printer can print each month (based on your subscription plan). The HP Instant Ink program locks out cartridges when the subscription is cancelled, even if the supply has not been consumed, and has been known to lock out the starter cartridges included with some HP Printers. The Dynamic Security feature can also be used to lock cartridges to a specific printer (This is known as Cartridge Protection in the settings menu), to prevent the theft of cartridges. To be honest, beside the fact that ink is unnecessarily expensive in some cases, I generally don’t hear of people stealing cartridges from a functioning printer; usually they just steal the whole printer!
The Dynamic Security feature is supposed to be an optional feature on HP Printers, and in many cases, it is an on/off toggle for the printer. With the exception of the now-discontinued “E” series of LaserJet printers. In my client’s case, it seems the Dynamic Security feature isn’t fully disabled on the Printer even with the “Cartridge Policy” and “Cartridge Protection” settings disabled. The printer also has the “Not On Supply” setting checked for Usage Information to ensure usage information isn’t being written to the chip on the cartridge. But, despite all of that, the printer still blocks the supply for being non-HP.
My assumption here is the chip provided by the third party toner supplier is mis-programmed in such a way that the printer isn’t able to recognize it. I’ve seen the same thing happen rarely with HP cartridges as well, and all of this is typically a warranty replacement away from being fixed. To solve this problem for my client, I simply took the chip off of their old, spent supply, and placed it onto the replacement supply. The printer showed the supply was empty, but this is to be expected. I simply told my client to print until the supply stops printing acceptably, and then change the toner out once again.
Another fix for this sort of thing, besides exchanging toner cartridges or transplanting chips, is to try to downgrade the firmware on the Printer to a version prior to HP Dynamic Security being introduced. My client’s printer had firmware dated from February 2025, as the printer had automatic updates enabled. I was able to locate old firmware for my client’s printer with some web searching, but the printer refused to accept the downgraded firmware whether attempting to flash it through USB or by sending it via HP’s own update tool, even with the automatic updates setting set to disabled. It’s possible this is due to Firmware Signing mechanisms introduced in newer firmware, or by the currently installed firmware intentionally blocking downgrades. Maybe with some more playing I can get it to downgrade – I don’t want to risk bricking the printer however, especially since my client needs it, and it is not my own hardware to be tinkering with.
It would be great, though, considering HP has a notice up on their website about a lawsuit for the Dynamic Security feature for this specific printer model, if HP would just knock it off, given they continue to see lawsuits for their printers due to this feature. Even with acknowledgement of this issue, and claiming they are not in the wrong, HP’s software doesn’t seem to provide you with a “Just use it” button. Especially after the warranty has expired on a printer, and HP has no obligation to service the machine. They also haven’t made efforts to offer downgraded firmware lacking the Dynamic Security feature available on their website, showing they have neither been incentivized to do so, and are acting in bad faith.
Cartridges weren’t always chipped… and printers used to just use it.
Chipped cartridges are one of the reasons why Ink Tank printers are gaining popularity today. They are not a new concept, so to speak. If anyone remembers older Bubblejet printers (I do! I had the Canon i900D), many of these were miniature versions of what an Ink Tank printer is. The cartridges were effectively just tanks with a sponge to sit in between the tank and the print head. The sponge would remain saturated with ink to provide a steady flow of ink to the print head, and a electrical heating element within the print head would vaporize the ink and spray it onto the page. The print hozzle and print head were part of the printer, which meant going months without printing, and having the printer turned on, would mean print quality wasn’t always up to snuff until the ink began to flow again. Printers would also need to routinely perform head cleaning and utilize some ink to maintain the print head, by using a sponge built into the printer itself. Sometimes these needed maintenance/replacement.
Classic Inkjet cartridges were much of the same way early on (and you could shake them to tell), but many have since moved onto tiny, supersaturated sponges without an ink reservoir, effectively turning ink into liquid gold. Many cartridges contain built-in print heads, which reduces the chance of clogs impacting the print results or reliability of new cartridges. Traditional InkJet printers rely on a piezoelectric crystal to vibrate, extracting ink from a saturated sponge and spraying it onto paper, which typically means there are a small amount of electronics baked into each cartridge.
The cartridges themselves in a Bubblejet printer were not microchipped (unless you bought an Epson, or a modern model), but instead used pinholes on the cartridges to identify the cartridge was installed correctly. Some printers didn’t even have a mechanism to identify the cartridge, therefore allowing you to install Cyan into a Magenta slot, and finding out the hard way that something is wrong. On some printers, you could even replace the print head carriage with a custom, continuous ink delivery system, allowing you to replace the small ink cartridges with giant tubs of ink, with the cartridge head extracting the ink via tubes – exactly the way an ink tank printer works.
The idea behind a Bubblejet was to increase the print quality beyond what an InkJet would normally be able to supply, and make an ink cartridge a bit more economical for people, especially during a time where Personal computers were becoming more popular in homes and businesses. When I had the Canon i900D, that printer produced some of the best photo and document prints I’ve ever had out of an ink-based printer at the time, even though the printer itself was slow (at 2-12 pages a minute when it wasn’t printing photos). Refilling a Bubblejet cartridge could be done at home, and typically required a bottle of ink, a small funnel, and a plug/adhesive tape to seal up the top of the cartridge. Cartridge leaks (Which were a pain) would occur if the plug wasn’t making a good seal with the cartridge.
The other neat thing, though, about the Canon i900D Printer I had, was the ability to tell it to just print. Even if the ink was low or if a cartridge was missing. It would know about the missing cartridge. You could often squeeze out another 20-30 pages from a cartridge (although photos were likely not going to make it very far) that was running dry. But, this did come with a consequence, which is what lead to the retirement of my printer. The printer could be instructed to run dry on ink to the point where the heating element responsible for heating and spraying the ink, would overheat and begin burning residual ink off of the print head, and eventually destroy the print head. This happened to my Canon printer, after a family member realized you could just press the Resume button and tell it to keep printing. The printer threw an error, released some smoke, and that was it. I replaced the printer as it had also developed other mechanical issues in time, I needed a multi-function printer for scanning, copying, and the rare fax, and having to fix those along with replacing the print head and all of the cartridges wasn’t worth it.
Anyhow. Just wanted to talk about printers and subtly rant about HP’s Cartridge Protection practices. Buy a Brother printer if you’re in the market. Brother is one of the few remaining printer companies that hasn’t gone evil with the use of aftermarket supplies.
