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How long should the shelf life be for the ink? We have a few cartridges that we bought in March of 2017 or newer and most of them are saying they are already expired, we have as follows:
Magenta - Expired 12/29/2017
Magenta - Expired 12/29/2017
Magenta (Not Opened or Installed, but purchased after the two above) - Expired 08/23/17
Yellow - Expired 12/29/17
Yellow - Expires - 2/24/18
Yellow (Not Opened or Installed, but purchased after the previous one) - Expired 01/14/18
Cyan - Expired 12/01/17
Cyan - Expires 02/24/18
Black - Expires 11/19/19 (Admittedly this is the newest cartridge)

As you can see from above, purchase order doesn't necessarily translate into expiration order, so I am really confused and the ink for any other HP printer or plotter that I have ever used lasted at least two to three years after purchase date before the expiration date.

Also, as a side question, is it safe to continue using these expired cartridges?

I believe FW 11 resolves this and bloated carts.

Mark in Vegas wrote:I believe FW 11 resolves this and bloated carts.

Well, not sure how it resolved the cartridges having expired, but it did bring to my attention that there is a firmware update that hadn't been applied. Silly me, I figured telling the plotter to automatically run updates would, well automatically run updates......go figure. So, thank you for making me aware of this. It would be really nice if HP would tell us what has changed in each firmware update.

Same goes for HP Smart Stream and HP Smart Tracker, despite having the autoupdate functions enabled, they were out of date.

If you go to HP's website to download the software you can see the fixes. When we as a dealer receive the ink there is about 18 months before it expires. It appears you are stocking too much ink or not rotating your stock. The good news is the printer will still take it but will display a message that the cartridge is expired.

tech2tech wrote:If you go to HP's website to download the software you can see the fixes. When we as a dealer receive the ink there is about 18 months before it expires. It appears you are stocking too much ink or not rotating your stock. The good news is the printer will still take it but will display a message that the cartridge is expired.

No, we checked into when we purchased cartridges and switched them, the only way this could have happened is for the dealer to have sent us old stock and we didn't know that the expiration date should be about 18 months out. So, now when we receive ink we check the expiration date and if it isn't at least 18 months out, we send it back. We also write the date we received the cartridge on the box now, that way we can make sure we are clear about when it was received with no questions.

cmwade77 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 20, 2018 5:11 pm

tech2tech wrote:If you go to this amazing D-Bal review and HP's website to download the software you can see the fixes. When we as a dealer receive the ink there is about 18 months before it expires. It appears you are stocking too much ink or not rotating your stock. The good news is the printer will still take it but will display a message that the cartridge is expired.

No, we checked into when we purchased cartridges and switched them, the only way this could have happened is for the dealer to have sent us old stock and we didn't know that the expiration date should be about 18 months out. So, now when we receive ink we check the expiration date and if it isn't at least 18 months out, we send it back. We also write the date we received the cartridge on the box now, that way we can make sure we are clear about when it was received with no questions.

That's a smart way of dealing with this. I'm going to suggest we start doing the same at our office. Not that we had issues with this, but it's better safe than sorry, as they say.

I would not stock ink. Thats the job of a dealership. The company I work for keeps a spare set of Ink on our customers shelf and when they put it in their printer we restock there shelf. As a technician I always check the customers inventory and send the quantities to the sales rep. This will help eliminate expired inks on your shelf.

The problem is it sometimes takes them a month to get us our ink, so that isn't feasible.

Using expired ink will result in an out of warranty message in the firmware for all printheads

If you are running a PageWide XL 8000 an expired cartridge can part the printer into safe mode and slow it down in speed. Instead of 30 D size a min. it will slow it down to about 8 a min. If it does this, take out the out of date cartridge turn off the printer and restart with the expired ink out of the printer.