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Comment by gnaffle | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone confirm that there are toner cartridges that stop working after a set number of pages? I thought this only applied to inkjets. My (10 year old) laser printer will happily print until the pages become unreadable - and then some more and some more after shaking the toner cartridge.

I think an open source laser printer would be an insanely cool hardware project. Although probably not cost effective due to the complexity, at least you would know exactly why the paper jams occur!

But you never know, the IP0X open source hardware project has had great success with getting chinese manufacturers to produce affordable hardware: http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=440 some of which can compete with very expensive "mainstream" offerings.

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Yes. Many printers are set to stop printing when the toner gets low. I have a Konica Minolta 2300 that does this, but there is a setting to let it keep printing even when the toner is empty. So when the colors run out, the black will keep printing until it is completely empty. There is no comparable setting for the drum. Once the machine has decided that the drum is finished, you can't print anymore.

It is worth noting that almost every printer I have installed in the last 20 years comes with the settings on 'best quality' which is code for 'use the most toner/ink'. You can often get much greater life and printing speed by changing the default settings to 'economy' or similar. Usually the only time you would notice a lack of quality would be when you print photographs. For the vast majority of printing that I do (office conditions) the quality difference is negligible. The speed and toner savings are not.

I can confirm that Brother printers stop working even though the toner still prints perfect pages. I couldn't believe that a company would program a functional product to suicide, so I did some searching on the subject. There used to be a hack that was possible to get Brother printers to continue printing by covering an "eye" on the printer (http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/39806). However, the new Brothers (like my HL2270DW) no longer have this exploit available.

I feel that a company that would deliberately program its toner to stop functioning, is questionable on moral grounds. It is purposeful destruction of value. It hurts the environment and is wasteful.

I was able to get this to work on an HL2140 last year. I just taped a small piece of construction paper over the eye on the cartridge and it happily went about printing for quite some time- I made it through an entire ream before the quality degraded. Since then, I always cover the eye on new cartridges before I insert them and use the quality of the prints, not the printer itself, to let me know when to buy more toner.

Ah yes, you're right. The hole was supposed to be on the toner, but the hole no longer existed on the toner required by my printer (judging by toner/hack pictures I found online and threads discussing the hack for my make). Glad it worked out for you. Don't replace your printer!

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