incompatibility

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

Technology Incompatibility by Sten Grynir Why do manufacturers go out of their way to make life hard for their customers? Especially in the consumer electronics industry, a lack of standardization and compatibility means a perpetual search for matching items, and unnecessary expenditures for the consumer. All of this is without any economic or technological justification, unless you are cynical about the added revenues garnered by the manufacturer. Two items are especially notorious in this regard: computer printers and cell phones, but most electronic devices incorporate at least one non-standard element to make life difficult.

Imagine a world in which every brand and style of lamp and lighting fixture required a bulb with a unique base; bulbs for a particular lamp could only be purchased from the lamp manufacturer, or possibly from a few after-market supply companies, although the lamp itself comes with dire warnings about voiding the warrantee if anyone else's bulb is used in the fixture. This is exactly the situation that exists with home ink-jet printers. Even within a brand, an ink cartridge fitting one printer may not be approved for use in another, similar printer of the same brand. Canon has more than 10 different ink cartridges (not counting colors and special photo inks), Lexmark has four, Epson has more than 20, HP has more than ten. Often, the cartridge used in a printer is different from that used in its successor model. If you and someone else in your family have two different printers, you can't share ink cartridges if one of you runs out of ink at 3 AM on a Sunday night, with that all-important report due on Monday morning. If you upgrade your printer to the next model, any unused cartridges may be useless.

A similar situation exists with respect to cell phones. Not only do they use different batteries, but the charging port has a different configuration from phone to phone. A charger for one phone won't work with another, sometimes even if they are the same brand. Batteries are often incompatible as well. If you buy accessories for your phone, you have to look carefully to ensure that it will be compatible with the model you use. If you change phones, you often find that you have to re-buy all of the accessories you have grown used to. Hands-free devices are the exception; most (but not all) use a standard small phone jack to connect the phone to earpiece or speaker, permitting interchangeability.

Digital cameras have incompatibilities of their own. Batteries are not standardized, and at least five different kinds of storage media are used by various cameras as electronic film.

Computers used to have the same problems, but over time, computer manufacturers standardized on the structure of the IBM PC, and evolutions in hardware have maintained a standardization that today allows peripherals and circuit boards to be used in any desktop machines, regardless of brand (except for Apples). When you buy a new disk drive, a modem or a video card, you don't have to look at the side of the box to see if it mentions your brand of computer. Laptops, of course, are a different matter. In order to cram as much computing power and I/O devices as possible into a small space, each laptop has adopted a unique physical configuration that dictates the size and shape of its components. Memory boards, disk drives, I/O devices such as CD and DVD units or floppy drives, and batteries frequently are peculiar to a specific laptop model. This is slowly changing, especially for disk drives, as standardized units become more common, but there is still a long way to go.

Can we look forward to similar standardization in printers, cell phones and cameras? Probably. Cell phone and camera manufacturers will no doubt move toward a smaller number of battery types, power connectors and media as these gadgets become commodity items. Printers, however, are likely to follow the pattern of razors: there's more money in selling the blades than in selling the razor. Unless the consumer objects loudly and votes by withholding purchases, the printer companies are likely to continue to milk cartridge incompatibility as a source of revenue.