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.
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]
Here's a visual of the blades if you're curious. https://youtu.be/UlB832MOUtQ?t=7
[1]http://www.uninetimaging.com/downloads/technical/TecArtWebAd...