I'm not sure how many Highway members have HP printers and whether they use genuine (expensive?) HP cartridges or cheaper alternatives, but in the news today, it seems that HP printers may be rejecting certain non-genuine cartridges.

We've always recommended the use of genuine cartridges, as these are likely to cause fewer problems and will generally give better quality results.  When you consider how much you 'save' by buying cheaper alternatives, it doesn’t amount to much.  If you're doing a great deal of colour printing the cost difference obviously increases, but we would say that you should consider using one of the many commercially available print services from your local supermarket to online offerings.

When a printer is installed the manufacturer wants you to use the ‘recommended installation’ to install other software, one purpose of which is to try to steer you towards their replacement cartridges.  Another result of using recommended installation settings is that software updates (more correctly known as firmware updates) are downloaded and installed.  It is likely that the software to stop non-HP cartridges was part of an update from HP.

When Highway installs printers we rarely use the recommended installation that comes with the printer as it contains so much unnecessary software.