Epson Proofers now Chip Free?

[Slappy]

Our Color Calibration guy left me a VM a few weeks back saying that we'd likely start getting ink carts without the dreaded Chip & we need to update our Firmware. Has anybody heard of/seen these yet?

I assume that the proofer will still see the other carts we already have on-hand with the chip, but I'm hesitant to flash the thing just yet.

[David]

smells like trouble to me.
We have some Epson's but I don't buy the cartridges.
I doubt that it would work if you have one cart without a chip and the others with.

Once it's updated, it may not recognize the "chipped" versions, or it could and just ignore the chip?
It's Epson, who knows what you'll get.

or a genius marketing plan to get you to buy more ink....

[johnny_jay]

We upgraded the firmware in our P7000, have not seen the new cartridges yet but they are probably running down inventory. All our cartridges have been chipped so I'm sure all will work fine.

Before this, we did have 2 cartridges with bad chips and we could not use. Epson wanted a signed letter from the Pope for a return se we had to eat them.

[Possum]

You may get stuck with a machine that only recognizes unchipped carts, which will then be very hard to find, if things work out as usual.

[DigiCorn]

In a known good empty ink cartridge, razor blade down the label, split the cartridge open and remove empty bag of ink. Take the new unchipped cartridge and do the same. Place it in the old, good, cartridge, snap together and use. That used to work on our Iris (Epson ink was cheaper than Iris branded ink, but the Iris was a rebranded Epson with different tabs on the plastic cartridges).

Nobody fucks with Dice; Dice does the fuckin'!

[RMPrepress]

Updated the firmware on our P9000 about a month ago.
Like Johnny said though...no new cartridges...yet.
I have never had an issue with the Epson chips in their cartridges.
Although we use the 700ml cartridges now so we change them out half as much as we used to with the 350ml's.