OKI’s new three year warranty and service agreement, which is free for customers registering online, is invalidated or unusable with third-party consumables.
The warranty (German) is called Free First Class Service, and lasts for three years, with customers told that “if you register online within 30 days of purchase”, they can “benefit from three years of free warranty” in Germany, including “free on-site/next day service”, but “only with genuine OKI consumables”, as the warranty only applies “if [for] the entire warranty period only genuine OK consumables [are] used”.
The free warranty is said to “automatically benefit OKI customers after online registration”, and must be take within 30 days of the purchase of a printer, with any customers missing this deadline getting the standard two year warranty return and “carry-in service”. This means that the next-day service option is only available with the three- year warranty, and is “omitted” from the two-year warranty.
In terms of the cartridges, OKI claims that its printer models are “designed to operate only with genuine OKI consumables”, which are “designed to protect your device and to maintain its full functionality”,, shown by the “exclusive identification with the brand” and the “original packaging”. Certain printers are exempt from the next-day service anyway, such as the B2200, the B401 series, the MB441 and MB541 series, the C301 and C321 series, the MC332 and MC342 series, and the POS 411 and 412 series, which are only able to utilise a two-year warranty.
European trade association ETIRA has been made aware of the wording in the guarantee, and has stated that it will “write to [OKI] and insist they remove this text”.