[dexzod]

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.

[DangitBobby]

Also intentionally telling your users they are out when they aren't is literally fraud.

[rolenthedeep]

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.

[briga]

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

[aidenn0]

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)

[techdragon]

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.

[bigfudge]

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.

[happymellon]

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.

[pmx]

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

[joshspankit]

If you don’t need colour, find an older black and white toner printer. Cheap and reliable.

[aidenn0]

B&W Brother lasers are the "least-bad" if you don't need color.

[justinclift]

Unfortunately, Brother also seems to have switched to pulling DRM crap and similar recently too. :(

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

[kcartlidge]

> B&W Brother lasers are the "least-bad" if you don't need color.

Over a decade in on my B&W Brother HL-something-or-other-im-away-from-the-desk. No shenanigans, just good printing.

[dkersten]

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.

[chaostheory]

If you think Samsung is bad, HP is much worse. Stay away from HP printers including laser

[onemoresoop]

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?

[Syonyk]

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.

[actionfromafar]

You can gently turn the cartridge over and, back and forth. This will shake toner loose, and you can turn a "gray" cartridge black again.

But you may also get a little toner on you or the floor, so beware.

[Syonyk]

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.

[analog31]

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.

[knaik94]

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.

[hcrisp]

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.

[t0bia_s]

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.

[chimprich]

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.

[Dylan16807]

> Stay away from HP printers including laser

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.

[neilv]

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.)

[max-ibel]

Ye olde Deskjet 500 was pretty good, however.

[grishka]

TIL people actually throw laser printer cartridges away instead of having them refilled for pennies multiple times over.

[culi]

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

[synaesthesisx]

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.

[culi]

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