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★★★★★ 1
Good printer ... Until Epson bricked it with Firmware
Style: WF-3820
Bought this as a replacement for a small office HP that died on us. It is a good machine. Nice features at a reasonable cost. Good color, full duplex, excellent scanning, and reasonable speed. The drivers are fairly crappy in that they constantly want to update and are poorly written and appear to send too much data home. (max out two cores on a modern i7 for a tiny printer driver update.) Overall a good machine and excellent for the price. Epson ink is ridiculously priced so went with high quality refurbished ink cartridges. Worked great at a good price.
Fast forward to July 2022. Epson pushes firmware update for "performance, stability, and security updates" that seems harmless. Who doesn't install newer firmware when it is offered? After the firmware update the printer claimed that the ink cartridges were faulty and refused to function. Turns out that the printer is now a brick until I buy genuine Epson ink refills at an exorbitant price. Turns out the company has had a number of class actions against them in the past for this very shady practice. Time to write up some copy for social media and contact a lawyer. It should be illegal to remove capabilities from a product that has been bought and paid for and working for months. Certainly I will never buy another Epson product and neither will anyone at my company.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2022
