If you have a Samsung laserprinter with number pad and empty toner / imaging unit try menu # 1904 menu and reset the counter, then happily print thousands of pages more
This is outrageous. Only a small percentage of owners know this kind of tricks. Imagine the environmental damage created by thousands of users throwing away perfectly usable cartridges. I always feel bad about throwing away laser printer cartridges, they have so many components that are working just fine, there should be a way to just refill the toner and reuse it.
You can buy kits online to refill your toner carts. It's cheap and fairly easy to do.
You just gotta make sure you get the right kit for your printer, as most have a chip in them that acts as a page counter. You typically have to replace the chip when you refill.
Some models like mine require you to melt a hole into the cartridge, there's no external access to the toner tank. Make sure to do your research and don't buy the cheapest kit you find. The quality of the toner does matter and will greatly affect print quality.
If you think that’s bad, consider that some printers are literally cheaper to buy than the ink replacements. Since new printers come with cartridges it can be cheaper to just buy a whole new printer whenever you run out of ink
Beware that some printers come with cartridges that are the same size as refills but contain less ink/toner (or are at least programmed to tell the printer they have less)
I think the entire situation is best summarised as ... "Beware of printers"
They basically all (but I will leave room for the possibility of a non-evil printer vendor) suck in a myriad of different ways from poor quality, to all the various dark/anti-patterns in both the original sale and the subsequent consumable sales.
I actually want a printer, but know this and have put off buying one for about a year now because I can’t be bothered to spend hours working which is the least shitty.
I have a brother laser, it doesn't have a counter and will run past the point where there is no ink, so I can replace the toner when I'm ready to.
If it is low and the page is faint that's fine for my home printing. I don't need HP to tell me to replace the cartridge. Caveat to that is that it is "only" black and white but then I've never needed to print colour.
They also support Linux so all the computers in the house work fine with it.
If you're not set on a laser printer have a look at the epson ecotank range. You can literally just fill up the tank in the printer with ink and there are 3rd party inks available for a fraction for the price of 1st party refills. We have one that we have "converted" to a sublimation printer simply by filling it's tanks with sublimation ink. It's capable of some impressive results https://imgur.com/a/QTyDPu8
Same for me. I’ve wanted to get a printer for quite a while but don’t want to spend the time researching which one won’t try to rip me off, lie to me and defraud me. So I haven’t bought one.
Is Brother any better? So far happy with my Laser Brother, way happier than the nightmares I've had with inkjet printers. But I have to admit we changed the tonner after less than 2000 pages. I assumed the cartrige had small capacity and didn't arise my suspicions. Should I worry?
No. They just run X pages and assume the cartridge is empty.
You can reset it with some faintly annoying incantations, and I'd suggest doing so until you notice actual print quality issues. Especially on black.
The logic is... reasonably sound from a print quality perspective. "We know the cartridge can print XXXX pages of reasonable coverage without any fading/dropouts/etc. If the user replaces it at that point, they will never have any print issues." If your goal is "flawless printing," it's a reasonable enough path. It's just not particularly cost effective for the end user. It is, however, cheaper and more profitable than actual toner level sensor/mixing device/etc.
But, yes, there's a hidden menu to reset the toner counter on Brother, and in my experience, there's at least another 50% of rated capacity pages lurking in the cartridges unless you print very toner-heavy pages.
Yes, and if you're trying to save every penny, that's reasonable. Brother doesn't prevent you from doing this, you just have to look up the toner counter reset process, which is trivially found online.
It's exceedingly unreasonable for something like a small office printer to have people constantly reprinting things because the toner is almost, but not entirely out, so please remove the cartridge, shake it gently, etc. Remember, the paper you're spending on partial prints and the toner you're applying isn't free either, and people's time isn't, either. Neither is the carpet cleaning of the toner spot in front of the printer from people trying to stretch it.
I'll reset the counter on mine, give it a shake, and run it until I see any impact on printing, but as soon as I notice any streaking, I just replace the cartridge. It's not worth the hassle to fight for 100 pages of toner to me at this point in my life.
The incantations are printed out and taped to the side of my Brother printer. I can live with light prints for a while. Until I got a recent tablet device, a lot of my prints were sheet music that was used once.
Compared to others, I have had good experiences with Brother. The reset procedure is well known enough, for any model I have worked with, that compatible third party toners include a picture with the reset directions on the Amazon listing.
I know that Brother includes a starter cartridge that usually includes less than even a standard size replacement. They have high yield cartridges and I have only ever seen the bigger size in third party replacements.
The model I have is the 2270dw which was purchased years and years ago. The bigger replacements are rated at 2600 pages and standard are 1200. The drum unit can do up to 12000 and I don't think we've replaced that yet. I did reset it a couple times to get past the toner warning, it continued printing well into faded pages without issue. All it took was holding a button on the front while turning it on and then pressing the same button a specific number of times after initializing. The third party replacements are priced reasonably well in my opinion.
I had a Brother inkjet printer that would give low ink warnings when the cartridges obviously had more left. I found if you used a black marker to mark the translucent side of the cartridge it would stop complaining and let you print hundreds more pages. It also wasted tons of ink on frequent "head cleaning". One day it finally stopped printing one of the colors despite no mechanical problems. So I got a Canon and have been happy ever since.
I have Brother HL-L2300D. I can print around 2500 pages from non-genuine toner.
Annoying is sleep mode that cannot be changed. Printer won't turn on when I send print task to it. I have to turn on printer manually every time before print.
A full refill for my HP 8725 seems to be £158! The previous identical cartridges cost £85, and that was an insult. This is getting beyond ridiculous.
It's not like printer tech has improved much in recent years. I suspect a lot of what they're charging me for is R&D into how to prevent customers from using 3rd-party cartridges and a big profit hike to congratulate themselves for doing so successfully.
Do you think that applies to the Neverstop models? They have an internal toner tank that refills with syringes, so this kind of nonsense isn't really possible.
Is this recent from LaserJets, or involves HP software off-printer?
My HP LaserJet Pro 400 series m401n will keep printing even as the print quality fades, presumably due to actually low toner.
(This is running with CUPS and open source PCL drivers on the client, talking TCP to network passthrough to printer's USB, no HP-written software used off-printer.)
more modern printers have smarter chips that are harder to reuse and the printers can even permanently brick themselves if it thinks you're using non-proprietary cartridges
Generally some folks will re-use the proprietary cartridge, but manually refill them. In the mid 2000s I used to do this with inkjet cartridges - you could remove some of the labels/wrapper on the cartridge to expose a port that was accessible via syringe, and refill the reservoirs with cheap ink.
Or how about the environmental damage of implementing a chip onto every cartridge that is at least 10x expensive as the ink and plastic materials and who's sole purpose is to enforce that you're only using proprietary cartridges for your printer
I bought a Samsung printer a few years ago. A couple of months later, I discovered that Samsung's printer arm had been acquired by Hewlett-Packard - the company I least wanted to buy a printer from.
My printer has no number pad. It has a horrible menu system you navigate with arrow-keys. The cartridge it came with was tiny - it lasted for less than a ream. But the replacement I bought is still going strong (I don't print more than a couple of pages a week, which is why I didn't want an ink-jet).
My laser Samsung from 2013 has a just small display and simple function buttons. But I never got an original cartridge - the replacement I can get online are far cheaper and cost me about 8.50 EUR without the delivery cost.
The printer works but paper feeder rollers seem to struggle now. I'm afraid that once it gets broken beyond any repair I'll have to get new which will chain me to official supplies.
ghacks.net [1] has published a news about Epson ending the laser printers production while focusing more on inkjet segment from now on, which as they claim are more eco than laser ones. One of the users in the comments says HP already region-locks their cartridges
Haha, yes, I should have made that more clear - I only meant lubricate if there are any bearings or rolling surfaces, definitely not on the parts that are meant to grip! I had an old printer where one end of the steel roller was in a simple plastic bearing and it was squeaking, a drop of oil fixed it. But I'm not an expert, maybe that wasn't a great idea.
Identical story here. The toner the printer came with lasted a few months. I refilled it in a local shop (the guy explained me that they had to replace the chip that counts the pages so refilling was expensive, but in fact it was a fraction of a new one). Still printing with that same toner after (I think) 6 years.
Just make sure you never do a firmware upgrade unless it's absolutely required, and, if possible, disable DNS lookups for FW upgrade with something like pihole.
My first and last Epson (inkjet) ended its life on my balcony after I took to it with a cricket bat, Office Space style. Never again. Leaks, overpriced cartridges, crappy software.
Had a Brother laser since then (HL-3170CDW) no complaints, just works, toner lasts forever.
The eco-tank epson models have been pretty good so far, except for a duplex feed that doesn't work well - and that is not economical to repair, given the printers not expensive. That's a separate concern - I'd prefer more expensive, but modular and repairable machines.
But I second Brother lasers - I have two for over 10 years, and they soldier on like on day 1.
Brother lasers also have a funky reset procedure (depends on model, but searchable on internet). It’s outrageous. You can get another 500 to 1000 pages out of it.
I've done this for a few office Brother laser MFCs. In my experience while you can get a couple hundred more pages out, pages may start being speckled and the cartridge will dust toner into the printer, even if there's still plenty of toner in the cartridge.
From what I can tell this is due to a rubber blade that cleans the toner cartridge's "drum" wearing out, which can sometimes (but not very easily) be replaceable. My guess is that while there's some encouragement of new cartridges going on, the print count is also at a lower number to prevent issues like it from cropping up.
I've also heard that as the cartridge goes through toner, some printers will increase voltage on the drums proportionally, which can be thrown off by resetting the toner level.
From a toner remanufacturing document:
"When the printer senses a new toner cartridge, the bias voltage is set to a high voltage. As the cartridge is used, the bias voltage is reduced gradually down. This process is necessary because according to Brother, a new toner cartridge has a tendency to print light. As the cartridge is used, the density increases. To keep the density level even throughout its life, the density bias voltage is reduced accordingly. Each time a new cartridge is installed, the bias voltage is reset to the high voltage point, and the cartridge page count is reset to zero." [1]
My brother laser printers have a setting on the web interface for what to do when the "replace toner" warning comes up: either continue printing or stop. They'll happily keep printing if configured to "continue".
For some of these it may be a quality issue. With less material to deposit in the cartridge it may not apply evenly. Lots of times this could be fine but it might not always be the case.
That's possible and understandable for high volume printers. But for personal/desk printers they should have an option like. Cartridges are running low on toner, would you like to enable degraded printing? Rather than having labyrinthine steps to overcome out of toner error (which are not in the manual mind you). My experience is that full color printouts do not suffer. When they do run out, it's noticeable and comes nearly at once --rather than slowly degrading.
My Brother laser printer has been reporting low toner for months (years?) now. Does it get to a point where it says toner is out and stops printing? For now, I just keep printing, and it's working just fine.
Canon also has a program like this, although they dont have that brilliant consumables separation of toner from drum that seems to be a brother-only hallmark at the sub $1,000 pricepoint. so you have to replace a perfectly usable drum with each toner change, like HP and all the rest.
I use mine less than once a month on average and I'm in my 40s :P
I use it for shipping labels, notices to put up, government forms as they are not very digital here. Sometimes a hardcopy of something I'm organizing and want to scribble on.
Also tickets and boarding passes as backup for the electronic version.
I'm still on the toner that came with the printer (which is half empty to begin with!) years after buying it. I use laser because it doesn't run when it gets wet and because there is no ink to dry out with low usage.
I have a printer in my home office only because of work.
For work we use QuickBooks Enterprise and it’s oriented to paper checks.
More interesting, some tasks are _faster_ when you use a paper print. I’m thinking of processing payrolls. You should verify before authorizing the processor to complete the run. I prefer to not waste paper and routinely verify the PDF on screen. But if things go sideways and I’m under pressure, a hard copy is the way to go.
Finally, I do my own vehicle maintenance, and a hard copy of the service manual page is good to have on hand.
I could go to Staples for the service manual pages, but for work that’s just a waste of time.
“Record keeping” mainly - official returns, paid for professional work product (lawyers, etc) - stuff that you’re obliged to keep, or would cost money to get a new copy of.