My Epson All-In-One Needs Ink To Scan To A USB Drive

epsonscanner

(Venkat)

Imagine that you have one of those combination toaster oven-coffee machines that exist for some reason. You don’t have any more coffee in the house, but that’s okay, because you can still use it to make toast. Right? All-in-one printers don’t work on that principle. Venkat’s Epson Workforce 610 could still work as a perfectly serviceable scanner, but it can’t. Because Epson has made sure that if it doesn’t have a full inkjet cartridge in it right this minute, he can’t scan.

I bought an Epson workforce 610 to get rid of my pile of documents and upload them to the cloud. It had a nice feature of scanning and directly storing to an USB stick in multiple formats(no need to connect to any laptop). I used this feature and got rid of almost 80% of my documents. The primary purpose of this printer is to scan and I occasionally printed few documents (probably around 40 sheets). Printer says the cartridges that came with the printer are empty and I can not to anything unless I replace the cartridges.

I was wondering is this even legal? Epson is forcing me to spend money on something that I don’t need.

Epson customer support says I can not directly scan now.

I didn’t want to give anymore hard earned money to Epson and just bought a Canon.

This should sound familiar: we’ve previously featured Epson printers that won’t print in black and white unless they have blue ink, and even more relevant: another Epson all-in-one that arbitrarily won’t do anything once it decides that it needs new ink pads. In that case, some customers found a workaround for the ink pads issue. There must be something similar out there…even if it voids the warranty.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.