[pmoriarty]

Some Brother laser printers have three serious downsides:

1 - They count pages printed and will simply stop printing when they've determined you've printed enough even if you still have toner in your cartridge.

2 - They will not work with third party toner cartridges.

3 - They won't let you refill your own toner cartridge.

So you are forced in to buying Brother's toner, and and forced to do so before you may actually want/need to.

[LeifCarrotson]

Citation needed? Or at least a listing of model numbers with this behavior. I've got a 12-year-old HL-2270DW that's doing fine at home, and have installed an HL-L2340D, an HL-L2380DW, an HL-L2390DW, and an HL-L8350CDW at work. None of them suffer from any of the downsides described to my knowledge.

We run third-party toner in all of them, and they'll keep printing until the print quality fades.

I personally haven't tried refilling toner cartridges in a long time, it's not worth it when third-party toner cartridges are as cheap as they are and the Comprenew up the road takes the empty ones back for recycling.

[MostlyStable]

If you have an old (>2ish years) non Internet connected printer, you're probably fine, but they pushed a firmware update last year that disabled third party cartridges. Luckily, for now you can just pull the drm chip from an official cartridge and put it in the third party one.

[Astronaut3315]

TN43x cartridges don't have the DRM chip, thankfully. They still sell printers that use them. Such printers cost a bit more than Brother's base models but to me, it was worth the extra.

[criddell]

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

At work, we have an MFC-8950DW laser printer and it's not very good. It leaves streaks on the paper and the toner doesn't seem to fix properly all the time. I end up with printed pages that smear or the type rubs off. That printer replaced a much older Brother laser and it was better. We "upgraded" simply because drivers were not available for 64-bit Windows.

[whynotmaybe]

Might be an obvious question but have you changed the drum?

[criddell]

I'm not sure if we have or haven't. Mostly what we print is pretty ephemeral so nobody seems to be all that concerned about it.

[pmoriarty]

> Citation needed?

Brother HL-L8260CDW

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B06XDS1XW7/R2MQHUVV9JX7N...

[Astronaut3315]

This model's toner is trivially reset with a one-time purchase of a $2 reset gear or a button press combo. The reviewer must not be aware of this.

There's also a fill port right on this printer's starter cartridges. Brother even provided a removable and reusable fill plug.

[Astronaut3315]

I just bought a refurbished HL-L8360CDW, a current model. It reads a physical toner reset gear on each cartridge. Resetting the toner is a matter of adding a missing gear (starter cartridges) or turning it to the reset position (retail cartridges). The printer has absolutely no way to know if a cartridge is genuine or reused.

The starter cartridges even come from the factory with a fill port covered by a removable plug.

The above applies to Brother printers that use TN43x series cartridges. Cheaper models have the reset chip dance.

[albert_e]

Mine is a DCP L-2540DW bought in 2015 for $99 from Staples / Office Depot.

#1 is a simple setting in admin console of the printer -- at least for my model.

It is called "replace toner" = "continue".

Default setting is "replace toner" = "stop printing".

I print for MONTHS at a time after the printer displays "replace toner" message with perfectly dark prints. Even when the print starts to fade out -- this setting ensures the printer wont refuse to print. Just keeps showing the low toner warning.

#2

I have not come across this restriction myself. Happily using cheap third party toners bought off Amazon for about 6 years now.

#3

Did not try but my guess is that should work too. I was just not motivated enough to try because cheap $10 toners on Amazon do the job for me.

[crazygringo]

Can you point to a source? Which printers?

Because I'll chime in with everyone else -- my HL-2270DW has been going strong for a decade and I've only ever used third party replacement cartridges. And it'll give me a "toner low" warning but still keeps printing.

[otcalex]

Found an HL-22070DW at Goodwill for $12 and immediately slapped some third party toner in there. It's been going strong for about 3 years and haven't experienced this at all.