Anyone had good experience with non-hp toner cartridge replacements?
Seems hp is playing price escalation... a cartridge that was ~$75 a few years ago is now $110 :-( ...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
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| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Does your HP laser cartridge have a built-in chip to prevent non-HP cartridges that don't have it being used in the laser printer? Also, many laser printers use page-counter chips to show the cartridge as being empty even when there is a fair amount of toner left in it.
I have a Samsung laser printer, and have twice refilled the cartridge with toner from partially used Brother and Kyocera cartridges. It is not too difficult, if a bit messy! Note that the Samsung has a page counter chip, but it is possible to short a couple of pins on the chip to reset it. To get round this, Samsung then rewrote the driver so it was no longer possible to reset the chip. Fortunately I never updated the driver in my laptop, even though it was pushed as a recommended update. Just another good example of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
I don't know. I've not experienced any page counter issues... it'll turn on the indicator that toner is low, but keeps on printing until I've run it dry... the condition it's in now... every page requires shaking the cartridge :-[
Printer is hp P2015dn
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Check the online reviews for the exact model(s) you want. Most old ones can be refilled at least once with no obvious loss of quality. Our VH has my old HP Laserjet and usage is low enough that it lasts forever.
Mine is a Dell 1320c for colour and Samsung for monochrome. Both run very happily on third party cartridges for about 1/4 the OEM price.
Not sure how locked down modern HP printers are wrt third party toner.
I don't know. I've not experienced any page counter issues... it'll turn on the indicator that toner is low, but keeps on printing until I've run it dry... the condition it's in now... every page requires shaking the cartridge :-[
Printer is hp P2015dn
...Jim Thompson
--
Hey Jim, You have a little company down your way called, Amazon, try it for
50% cost reduction and free shipping.
I order from them and run out to the mail box to wait for the truck.
Cheers, Harry
They carry multiple brands of non-hp toner. Which are good quality? ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
with excellent results on HP black toner cartridges. They will know if your cartridge has a chip or counter. My results with ink jet refills are mixed. Black is ok but color often ends up with a clogged jet or two. Art
Back when I used to print things I had an HP printer. It took several years to run out of toner and I bought a refilled replacement from eBay. It had a spot on the drum that put a spot on the page every four inches or so. Not fatal, but I would have liked to return it. However the seller played the high shipping cost game, $30 for the toner and $30 for shipping. I would have had to pay another $30 plus my shipping cost. This was also back when the sellers could review buyers and would hold their feedback until you gave yours like blackmail. So I had little recourse.
I didn't use eBay much back then. Now there are *lots* of free shipping sellers and the feedback is mostly in the buyer's favor so if you have a problem sellers are *much* more inclined to work with you. I've bought low priced items that weren't right and they just gave me a refund without requiring them to be shipped back.
I expect if you buy a refilled toner cartridge from eBay you will get something that works. If it doesn't you can return it and get another.
I don't think the big issue is necessarily the toner itself... it's the cartridge.
As I understand it, a lot of the lower-priced aftermarket toner cartridges are either just "refilled", or "remanufactured". A really good remanufacturing will include the replacement of many of the original parts with brand-new ones... e.g. the photoconductive drum, rollers, pads, and so forth. Very little is retained other than the plastic shell and other structural parts.
"Bargain" remanufactured cartridges don't always have all of the wear-prone parts replaced... and for those that are, you may get e.g. a "re-coated" photo drum whose lifetime won't be so great.
I've had problems "right out of the box" with an uncomfortably high percentage of remanufactured cartridges... scratches or defects on the drum, streaking due to rubber toner-wiping strips that had dried out and "gone bad" while the cartridge was on the shelf, etc.
The printers I've used are usually older Laserjets with no cartridge counter chips. I've usually gotten good results by buying original HP toner cartridges, and then refilling them myself a few times until they start showing signs of wear-out.
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Junk. When they work, they're fine. When the formatter board soldering craps out and has to be reflowed, they're a nightmare. When I have to replace the fuser roller, it's a 2 hr ordeal process. I think I have 3 or 4 printers on the shelf waiting for me to reflow the PCB's in the toaster oven:
I buy only the cheap toner carts on eBay and Amazon mostly for my customers (among other things, I do printer repair). The online toner carts are about 10% to 20% of the cost of a new cartridge. Batting average is about 90% which makes clone cartridges economical even with defective carts. (Hint: Always buy two carts). Quality varies. Most common problem is sometimes I get refills, where the vendor hasn't bothered to empty the cartridge waste bin. The printing will smear if it's not emptied. The good news is I usually get great service from the online vendors. I email them indicating that there's a problem with the cartridge. They usually just send me another one, and not ask for the return of the defective cartridge.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Yep, that's about it. I've seen shops that do "proper" rebuilds of cartridges. Generally, they do mostly the larger capacity cartridges for the HP business class printers, and avoid the consumer printer carts. They tear down the cart to it's basic parts and replace all the wear parts (scrubber, baffles, gears, etc). They also clean out all the old toner. It's almost a new cartridge when done.
Yeah, that happens. The refillers often do nothing more than refill the cart, with predictable results. I avoid those.
There are also the clone cartridges, which use copies of cartridge parts made in China. The copies are sometimes poor quality, but I've had fairly good luck with these as the overall quality seems to be improving.
Cartridges don't really "wear out". What happens is that the toner gets hard (plastic toner melts) inside the cart, and scores the drum and rubber scrubber blade. It takes quite a bit of abuse to make that happen. Unfortunately, not emptying the waste hopper on the toner cart is a sure way to make that happen. Then the waste bin fills, and there's no place for additional waste toner to go, it starts to collect on the scrubber blade and will eventually score the drum. To aggravate matters, there are numerous instructions on the web on how to refill toner carts which do not even mention the waste hopper.
Here's a good set of instructions:
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Depends on your point of view. Most of them do work just fine. If you buy the very cheapest nastiest replacement you can find then expect trouble but buy one that gets 3* or above from a reputable third party on Amazon and you would be unlucky to be able to notice the difference. Worth reading any 1* or 2* reviews to look for gotchas.
I have never paid full price for any toner or cartridge. Initially I got secondhand OEM ones from a known supplier resulting from the difficulty of assembling the printer generating orphanned toner cartridges. Out of warrantee I was prepared to run anything through it (especially since at one point I had bought a complete second unit just to get the three free sets of OEM toners thrown in with it). Basically the manufacturer required you to have a very steady hand if the thing was to be assembled without scratching the drum(s). A lot of writeoffs meant cheap original toner until the carbon copy boys caught up with it.
I am more careful with big inkjets but even there after five years I consider that it owes me nothing and so run with clone inks. Physical hardware failure occurred after about a decade no other problems.
Many modern models have been aggressively chipped so that selling the printer hardware is a loss leader and they make their money on the inks and toners. Inkjet inks for all-in-ones are the most usurious prices.
You can often refill a toner cartridge at least once without any obvious loss of quality. But if you can buy a new on for less...
I choose my printers today based on the availability of reputable third party inks or toner being available (or knowing a source of cheap OEM).
Yup. I discarded a high end Lexmark when the toner cartridge ran out. Ridiculous price (well over $100, IIRC) for it -- MANY years ago! "Let's add a chip so counterfeit toner cartridges won't work!!"
I think many of the "refillers" intentionally look for "original" HP toner cartridges to refill and are not interested in "after-market" (or, "previously refilled") cartridges just because they don't want to deal with problems in the mechanism. Apparently, "genuine HP" is virutally a guarantee that they can simply refill it and resell it (thereafter marking it as "refilled" so they never see it again)
For HP's, I have an LJ4 (that I've upgraded to a 4M+ w/duplexer with parts salvaged from other units) and an LJ5p and LJ6p. Each is still chugging along on the *original* toner cartridges that came with the printers when I acquired them! I think I have 4 replacements for the LJ4M+ and one for each of the LJ5/6p (same cartridge for each, IIRC). At this rate, paper will go out of style before I ever use up all the toner!
Of course, I don't print a lot and the print load gets spread around over a fair number of printers (I have 4 color printers in addition to the 3 monochrome). I really can't understand folks who go the inkjet route (I have an R1800 that probably sees the *least* use, here. Mainly for larger format color printing). The ink is insanely expensive and tends to dry out with irregular use.
I have always refilled them at least once or sometimes twice (although the second time can lead to getting toner spill overflow marks). I am too lazy to do anything more complex than unplug or drill and fill.
I keep a Laserjet 4 (one of my ex's) running for the VH. I have one pristine cartridge remaining for it. Their throughput is quite low. List
I use my inkjet for true photographic imaging in low volume and for printing posters at A3 for village events. I have one all in one Canon on 525/526 inks sat at my parents so I can scan/print/copy over there.
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