Canon ink cartridges were in the news back in October when the company was slapped with a lawsuit for disabling other functions like scanning when its printers were out of ink. Once again Canon cartridge is in news today, though this time it's for a different reason.
The company has announced in a support post that the global chip shortage has changed the way Canon makes its toners. The firm has opted to go chip-less for the time being as an interim measure and hence will be manufacturing chip-less toner cartridges for its printers and its various other multi-function devices. The chip-less toners will begin circulation around February. As this is an interim measure, Canon expects normal toner cartridges to return in the future.
The firm writes:
The global semiconductor chip shortage is impacting the supply of many electronic devices and some accessories. The impacted accessories include toner cartridge for Canon’s business printers and multifunction devices (MFDs)
[..] To ensure our customers don’t miss a print, Canon has innovated around the chip shortage to ensure that we can still supply the toner cartridges. Canon has started to manufacture chip-less toner cartridges. While there will be some inevitable, yet minor, changes to our customers’ experience, you will still be able to print as normal.
The chip inside a toner helps determine genuine Canon products, alerts users on the usage levels, among other things. However, a chip-less toner shouldn't affect the process of printing itself.
On the Canon support post, the company has detailed how to deal with error prompts due to the devices having chip-less toners. The post also lists all the impacted toner products.
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