The company has launched a video discussing “what you need to know about firmware upgrades”.
On its firmware site, the company hosts the video, What you need to know about firmware upgrades, which is also on YouTube, with the animated video featuring a voiceover. The video starts by explaining firmware updates are a “common way to fix” technology and “improve poor product performance”, with printer OEMs often using firmware updates to fix bugs.
However, Apex adds that “unfortunately for consumers” some OEMs “take advantage” to “block replacement chips and cartridges”, which results in “lost end-user confidence” in aftermarket products, and these effects are “felt throughout the industry”, but replacement chip design companies feel the “biggest impact”.
It went on to ask how firmware upgrades, answering that there are three main ways: downloading via the OEM website, upgrading directly through the printer’s interface through the internet, or through buying a new printer with preinstalled firmware. It adds that there are “many other ways”, and moves on to ask how upgrades impact replacement chips, answering that chips are the “too; through which” the printer communicates with the cartridge.
The printer, chip and cartridge are a “closed environment” that “can’t function without one element”, and chips consist of three “crucial” elements in data, software and hardware, with firmware upgrades “destabilis[ing] the printer’s ability to recognise the chip”, and locking out the cartridge. Chip companies, it points out, “need huge investment” and to be ready for when upgrades are made.
The company notes that its own response is shaped by an R&D team of over 200 people, testing and analysis on 2,600 printers that it’s purchased, or enough to “fill three basketball courts”, and it then discussed achievements over the last nine years. In 2008, it launched its Unismart chip resetter, which can reset over 900 OEM chips and 90 percent of Apex chips by reprogramming the data.
In 2012, it developed “advances in technology” and “cooperated with China’s biggest universities” to create laboratories, with its patent SoC technology helping stop attacks on chips. In 2014, it opened a firmware group within the company which studies updates and responds “very quickly”, while in 2016 it launched Apex Support, the “first app for the aftermarket” that provides the latest information on upgrades and new printers.
Finally, it noted that last year it launched the ActivKit tool that helps to solve data change issues, and concluded that it “looks forward to continuing on its path of providing support and technological advancements for the imaging aftermarket”. You can view the video below.