As much as I love giving the middle finger to a company as awful as HP, people need to stop supporting garbage companies like this and then this wouldn't be necessary.
One of my old professors worked at HP and chatted about his involvement in putting ICs in ink cartridges. From what I remember hearing, each one is flashed with calibration data to improve the print quality.
Does anyone know if this is still true, or if it makes that much of a difference?
HP cartridges attach the thermal print head to the ink tanks. The calibration is likely for controlling those heads. Each one has tiny heating elements that need to vaporize the ink at a precise temperature. Thermal heads eventually need to be replaced.
Compare to Epson printers that use piezoelectric heads. Those mechanically push droplets through. This is more complicated, but makes smaller dots.
At least on my HP printer, there is a process (I think called alignment?) to self-calibrate new cartridges. I am not sure if that is different from the type of calibration you’re talking about (maybe about colors). However, I’ve personally not found differences between using the printer’s own calibration processes and not doing anything. Nor have I found significant differences between first and third party cartridges. Some third party cartridges will print a little bit ‘fuzzier’, or maybe ‘thicker’ is the right way to put it. But not in a way that makes the printing worse, as much as different.