The ongoing chip shortage has prompted Canon to help its customers break the digital rights management (DRM) controls its printers use to reject toner cartridges from other manufacturers.
Ars Technica reports that Canon has provided information about the workaround in a German support article. “Due to the worldwide continuing shortage of semiconductor components,” the company says, “Canon is currently facing challenges in procuring certain electronic components that are used in our consumables for our multifunction printers (MFP).”
Canon isn’t struggling to source other parts—it seems to have plenty of toner, plastic, and whatever else it needs to produce these cartridges. It just can’t find the chips used to distinguish Canon-produced cartridges from those made by other companies. So it’s decided to “supply consumables without a semiconductor component until the normal supply takes place again.”
Its MFP software is designed to reject toner cartridges that don’t feature these identifying chips, however, so Canon had to explain how customers could get around that issue. The workaround is pretty simple: Ars Technica says printer operators simply need to click the “OK” button in a dialog box that appears when a non-Canon (or in this case non-chipped) cartridge is being used.
Canon says these non-chipped cartridges might lack some features—namely the ability to warn people when toner levels are running low—but that seems like a minor inconvenience compared to the prospect of going without toner because of a chip shortage. (Perhaps the practice of forcing printer buyers to use a particular manufacturer’s cartridges was ill-advised?)
A list of affected printers, all of which belong to Canon’s “imageRUNNER” line, as well as the specific instructions for proceeding with a print despite using a non-chipped toner cartridge, is available via Canon’s website. But the gist is that when a warning pops up, just hit the “OK” button, which might be the simplest way of bypassing access controls we’ve seen to date.
