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.

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