Do Printers Deliberately Ruin Print Quality After You Reset The Toner Count?

[BeebMaster]

Call me paranoid, but this seems to be happening every time. I use Brother laser printers, HL series, and they start complaining that the toner is low eventually. The printing does maybe become patchy in places. So you shake the toner cartridge a bit and put it back in, and you can get a few thousand more prints out of it.

Before long, the low toner message recurs, but there's no problem with the print quality, so you use that secret sequence of keypresses the interweb told you about to reset the toner count to 100%.

Then it starts spilling toner all over the page, on purpose.

In fact, I am pretty sure that these Brother printers have pistons inside to bash the toner cartridge when you close the lid again after a toner reset, to dislodge the toner and spill it all over the drum. You can hear it punching away as it "checks" what has happened since the lid was opened.

Is this happening to anybody else, or, as the Fujitsu helpline said to the befuddled sub-postmaster, am I the only one?

[Ukwebb]

cant speak for brother specifically, but as someone who's worked at a copier /printer dealer for 20 years, the following is true of Kyocera/Toshiba/Oki and many other manufacturers

First thing to know is, many cartridges don't know how much toner they have in them.
They are pre loaded with an amount of toner to do an average of around 6% coverage for the rated number of pages.
ie if they say its good for 10,000 pages - they mean 10,000 pages at 5% coverage ( they tend to put a little extra in to ensure they comply with the expected 5%)

The printer knows that a new cartridge is good for 10,000 pages. so it simply counts down from 10k each time a page is printed after a new cartridge is inserted. When it gets to 0 pages left the cartridge has "run out" . there may well be toner left, or you may run out faster depending on the coverage you actually do.

you can see this if you play with the SNMP info in the machine and look at the raw data for toner levels, you'll probably find its a large number that counts down to zero!

To check for running out early, the printer has a sensor in a hopper that checks for toner, and when it gets low, it asks the cartridge for more toner.
The cartridge will have an Archimedes screw (sometimes with mylar flaps on) inside the cartridge to wind the toner to the output hole. - (this is probably the clicking sound you can hear)
If the screw turns, and yet the hopper doesn't fill, then the assumption is that the toner is empty, regardless of the completed page count, or the amount of toner potentially still in the cartridge

The 'take it out and shake' trick works because there may be some toner stuck in the mechanism which has become compacted, so freeing this can get you a few more prints.. this compacted toner is why you're also advised to shake the toner before you put it in initially.

Telling the printer it has a new cartridge though, will do a number of other things that it expects to do with a new cartridge. like replenish the developer, top up the hopper, re-calibrate for differences between the old and new toners etc . However with an old toner, it wont be able to complete these 'new toner' actions properly, this is why they always tell you not to shake it as you will get image quality issues as a result.

[BeebMaster]

Thanks for all the technical info!

The problem with this printer is that eventually it says "toner empty" and refuses to print until either the toner is replaced or the counter is reset. And resetting the counter can only be done if the pending print jobs in its memory are cleared!

I'm sure it's all a scam to sell more toner.

[paulb]

I'm sure it's all a scam to sell more toner.

This is not as bad as the Canon Pixma multifunction printer/scanner that became e-waste because of a supposedly saturated sponge. Yes, the design involved a sponge sitting below where the print head would park itself, and one day an error code came up that, when translated using the documentation, indicated that the sponge was "full". Taking the unit apart confirmed that there was indeed a tiny sponge, along with quite a bit of ink splashed around: the printer's own attempt at being either Jackson Pollock or Maude Lebowski, I guess.

Resetting this error condition apparently required the involvement of an official Canon servicing operation, although one can bypass it every time the printer is switched on using some kind of death-grip button combination. You can imagine that Canon do not really offer support for out-of-warranty printers, and if such servicing operations still exist, they are likely to take good money for replacing the sponge (regardless of its saturation level) and resetting whichever counter is involved in triggering the error.

I did leave a couple of feedback messages on Canon's Web site berating them for their contempt for the planet, but I'm sure they were too busy making money to care. Karma did intervene during the pandemic, however, when they couldn't source their DRM chips and had to tell everyone how to get their printers to recognise their own ink cartridges, these being rejected by the printers as third-party imitations.

[BeebMaster]

I don't think Brother do that with their printers, I've never had a problem using 3rd party toners. But Canon also do that with camera batteries: "These batteries are not made by Canon, you may die...do you want to continue?" "Are you sure you want to continue, you may kill 42,000 people by operating the camera.." etc. It's especially irritating if you have a model where the SD card slot is inside the battery compartment, so you get these messages every time you access the card.

[Coeus]

Something related. I have had a laser printer in the past that refused to print in black and white if the yellow toner was reporting as empty. I wonder if this is due to the practice of printers of printing a unique ID as a series of yellow dots on each page.

[Ukwebb]

Most colour lasers will refuse to print if any toner is thought to be empty, as the self tests they do print onto the drum and are then scanned, to set the colour balances. Without all four toners they can't pass a self test.

[1024MAK]

Also colour laser printers may use the colour toner to help print grey 'colours'.

Mark

[flaxcottage]

Brother laser printers are known to do this.

Various forums on the web are full of comments and 'how to do' articles about squeezing the last molecules of toner out of a cartridge. Brother are over cautious with their toner empty detection. Shaking the toner, a recognised method with HP laser printers, does not work with Brother ones.

I had to bite the bullet and install a new toner cartridge.

As to using non-OEM toner/ink. I have tried it many times over the years and found it to be false economy, especially for photo printing. Third party inks do not match the colour of the photograph nor do the colours last. After a couple of years or so the blacks change to have a red cast and the other colours fade.

[BeebMaster]

One thing I haven't actually tried is turning the cog back to "full", might have to do that at some point.

I don't use ink printers so I can't comment, but I've never had much of a problem with third party toner cartridges. One "high capacity" one did leak toner quite a bit, but I unscrewed the bit where the foam strip is clamped in place and made sure it was toner-tight and it was all right then. I don't think I've bought a genuine Brother toner cartridge for at least 20 years.

I definitely wouldn't refill them myself, that seems to be a certain recipe for disaster.

[daveejhitchins]

Going back to the days of the Epson FX80 (great printer!) I alway kept a spray can of "Re-Ink" to hand - Been trying to find some for my now-working FX890 - not found any yet At least it was an easy fix but you did have to leave it to 'soak' for a while.

Dave H.

[Prime]

Going back to the days of the Epson FX80 (great printer!) I alway kept a spray can of "Re-Ink" to hand - Been trying to find some for my now-working FX890 - not found any yet At least it was an easy fix but you did have to leave it to 'soak' for a while.

Seem to remember using 'rubber stamp' ink to re-ink the ribbon on my Amstrad DMP2000 series printer...... seemed to work ok at the time.

Cheers.

Phill.

[BeebMaster]

Looks like you can still get original ribbons direct from Epson:

https://www.epson.co.uk/en_GB/products/ ... 9%29/p/677

[lovebug]

It sounds like its time for someone to write some open source replacement firmware for these printers

[BeebMaster]

Cursed machine hasn't done me a single clean print since I started this thread. Which is proof of what I said! Proof!!!

[Boydie]

My Brother colour laser doesn’t measure toner, just uses a print count.
I’ve been happily resetting for about a decade, with zero degradation in print quality.
I’ve replaced the black toner once, and am still on the starter colour toners, having reset each one at least twice.

[BeebMaster]

Follow up question: do printers deliberately ruin print quality after you replace with a 3rd party toner?

I put a new toner in a couple of days back as I went to printing almost white pages, and the print quality is worse! Black borders down each side of the page! It's like watching a proper TV programme on a picture-frame telly! More proof!

I wonder if the waste toner box is full, though it hasn't said so. And I wonder if I can empty it without ending up like Michael Banks on the roof of 17 Cherry Tree Lane...

[BeebMaster]

OK, Brother win. I have ordered a new drum unit.

I think I can see what the problem is. The black toner roller inside the drum unit has clear plastic tabs at either end, on the top side and underside. I think they are meant to catch loose toner at the far edges of the page. 3 of the 4 are missing from the black roller. Various BeebMaster bodges involving sellotape have failed to create a satisfactory replacement tab, so I am having to get a new drum.

I suppose it hasn't done bad, the printer has done over 50,000 prints with the original drum unit.