My solution is simply don't buy HP printers. Why allow yourself to get ripped off.

Epson, Cannon, Lexmark and many others produce excellent printers that come with cartridges that work all around the globe!

My husband who is Hungarian bought a HP Photosmart Premium C310a in Budapest in the beginning of June 2011. Then we had to move to Russia, Moscow.
When we were buying the device nobody told us about the regionalisation problems but we faced them then decided to buy cartridges for our HP device in Moscow.
We found out that the number of cartridges for our model is different in Europe and Russia:364 in Europe and 178 in Russia, then we went to a shop and bought original HP cartridges #178. We were surprised when the screen told us that the cartridges are unappropriate.
In order to clear up the situation we called to the Customercare Service of HR and they tried to fix the regionalisation problem by phone but failed.
When I asked them what we should do further the specialists of HR offered us to change our NEW and Good device (we had no problem with it except for this cartridges story!!!)for the regenerated one.
Regenerated device is a similar device which has been under repair for some reason and now is is fixed.
I was surprised even to hear that and explained that it seems to be very strange to change an almost new device for the device that was broken and then fixed. HP specialists told that that is all they can help. We wrote a reclamation letter to HP with the question if they really understand that people are moving from country to country nowadays and such a regionalisation problem looks like something restricting the people's mobility.
At the moment we are waiting for their answer.
I think it was my last purchase at HP!
Hope this information will be interesting for all interested people!

Come on, everyone knows that Malta or California, the printer NEEDS to be calibrated OR IT just won't work right. Ink is such a touchy thing. Yada yada yada. BS..

Hp just don't want cheaper economies selling to more expensive economies.

The solution to the ink ripoff is a laser printer. If you're put off by the higher initial price, just ask your friends with laser printers what it would take to get them to go back to inkjets.

I feel any cartridge made or sold anywhere in the world should work with all printers it was made for and hp should allow parallel imports of cartridges. Otherwise consumers who care about their money should switch to generic cartridges. Even if this does not work, then just dump HP for kodak or dell who do not sell their cartridges at a ripoff price like hp in western countries.

HP is run over bye the Japanese and others, but they are too greedy and stupid even to understand it.
It is more than ten years since I had a HP printer, and yes it is basically the ink that is killing them.
But, then again who cares.

Something for HP's benefit (without the typo this time!)..

http://www.michellesullivan.org/blog/305

Shells

Something for HP's benefit..

http://www.michellesullivan.org/blog/205

Looks like I got another reason to like Epson printers, not only are they better printers but there's less BS involved with them too. Hell the ink is cheaper too, granted not by much but cheaper is cheaper. Yes I know they cost like 10% more off the shelf but they yield about 20% more pages per cartridge plus they don't do any of the tricolor cartridge crap that some companies still think is a good idea where if one color runs out you lose what remains of the other two.

printer I will find out where my counterfeit or refilled cartridges came from and call HP to have them reset my printer to that region. That or just find a hack

An advantage for me ? How is it an advantage to have to pay support rates in order to get the printer I bought work with a cartridge I bought as well ?
You must still live in Soviet Russia, where people could not travel from one town to the next without an official authorization.
Well you're welcome to stay there.

It's business practices like this that have kept me and my company from purchasing HP products for quite awhile now. Unscrupulous is a good word, but it doesn't go far enough in describing HPs greed. Maybe they should just change their name to AIG, or Goldman Sachs.

@ W (is that the same "W" we "lost" to "Hussain":)

HTH means Hope this Helps and is "used sarcastically after answering a dumb question or pointing out an obvious oversight to a person of inferior mental qualities"

according to:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=HTH

Anonymous Coward's comment and its responses demonstrate that an irony tag is still badly needed. HTML5 fails us again! Think of the irony-impaired!

@HTH (aka Anonymous Coward)
I sure hope you work for HP and get paid double wages for spreading such drivel, unscrupulous is a good word to describe printer manufacturers though, thanks for pointing out such a descriptive term.

In my humble opinion, HP regionalization simply puts in place a private "tariff" structure to weaken the buyer's influence in a supposedly free global market. This single act is why HP came off my printer list years ago. There are competitors. Now that we know it is easy to reset the region codes, a good project would be to have folks call in, get the codes, and report them so they can be collected and published.

"prevent cheap cartridges intended for developing markets being remarked by unscrupulous dealers and resold at a huge markup in the West"

These cheap cartridges for developing markets...

Are these different cartridges from those sold in the West? I guess not.

Would the unscrupulous dealers be selling them in the West for more than HP does? Didn't think so.

So basically we have HP selling ink in the West at a huge markup. As a consumer (and not an HP shareholder) I'm still struggling to see where the clear advantage is. Your corporate line about organised crime is great and all, but if you dropped the price of your ink by a factor ten the problem would go away. So how about *you* help stop organised crime by being more reasonable with the pricing in the West?

Just a cheap *trick* to sell ordinary ink at outrageous prices by deliberately unnecessary "incompatibility".

If newspapers had to buy ink at HP's rates, your hometown rag would cost about $50 a copy.

The purpose of regionalizing ink cartridges is to prevent cheap cartridges intended for developing markets being remarked by unscrupulous dealers and resold at a huge markup in the West.

Thus, by buying genuine HP cartridges, the consumer can be certain that he or she is not funding organized crime, and that all profits are going where they belong - to the legitimate intellectual property owner.

HTH.