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.)