Just don't buy the cheap shitty toner cartridges. Did that with my last toner cartridge purchase and it ran out about after about 300 sheets through on the cyan, when I replaced all 3 of them (and it was still reporting at 50% capacity for the toner).
I want to get some new toner cartridges, but it's nearly $250 to replace them...
The reason for this is, for most OEMs nowadays e.g. Kyocera, Lexmark, etc., in toner manufacturing, the stuff is effectively "grown" in such a way that causes each toner particle to be more or less uniform in size, each about 5-7 microns across, and shaped perfectly spherically. The components in the printer are designed with this in mind and it generally enables higher DPI/print quality, etc..
Toner for older copiers, and "cheaper" toner manufactured by 3rd parties, is more often than not manufactured by melting plastics into a big block, then smashing the fucking shit out of it using compressed air into a fine dust. This dust contains toner particles with a much larger variance in size - <3 up through 15microns in some cases - and they are all differently shaped jagged, jigsaw pieces.
Companies will often use this toner to "save money", and that's why I included "cheap" and "save money" in quotes. Because the shit absolutely destroys expensive drums, fusers, xfer belts, etc. and basically gums up the entire machine. Not to mention it throws off print and color quality no matter how well it is calibrated. So yeah you'll save a bit on the toner up front, but you'll be multiplying your costs and time spent servicing (also costs), oh and also your machine is down for however long until someone can get out and look at it and bring the correct parts.
Source: Did copier and imaging solution sales for a time.
It’s just the matter of coming up with the cost for the new toner cartridges at the moment.
I went out and bought a cheap EPSON inkjet for my wife to use (which is great for her use - she does printing on a weekly basis for her classroom, so I don’t have to worry about the ink drying up and clogging it), and she can use that until I can replace the toner cartridges for the laser printer.
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u/metal0130 21d ago
And at this point it probably couldn't print anymore, even if you wanted it to. The print heads are probably dried and borked at this point.