Archive for the ‘Toner Cartridge Tips’ Category

When consumers order a new or remanufactured toner cartridge from a major manufacturer or a third party vendor, the cartridge will arrive with a shipping seal.  If it does not have a seal, the quality of that toner has been compromised and you should immediately contact the company you bought it from and get a replacement.  These seals are very important.  You probably wouldn’t buy a jar of pickles at the store if the plastic seal on the lid has already been removed.  Sure, there may be absolutely nothing wrong with those pickles, but it’s a safer bet to just grab a new jar with the seal intact.

The seal is a very thin material that is mostly inside the cartridge, but has an end sticking out that has a pull tab.  If the cartridge is inserted into the machine with the seal still intact, no toner will come out and as a result, the printer will be useless.  This happens more than one might think.  Be sure to remove the seal simply by pulling on the tab. 

A standard shipping seal is wrapped around one of the main rollers within the cartridge.  Its purpose is to fill the space that is in between the developer and application rollers as well as the spaces around the doctor blade.  With the gaps filled, no toner can be released thus protecting the cartridge from springing a leak.  It can happen on occasion that a seal is accidentally removed or not installed correctly.  The user will know this right away as the bag the cartridge is shipping in will be full of powder toner.  Sometimes the shipping seal can get jammed, so regardless of how hard you pull, it will not come out.  This would be considered defective and will warrant a replacement at no charge.

Often times, consumers will order third party compatible toner cartridges that work perfectly fine but are not being recognized by their printer or are giving an error message that toner is empty even though the new cartridge was just installed.  This is not only extremely frustrating for consumers, but it also negatively affects small businesses that deliver high quality remanufactured or compatible toner cartridges.  The truth is, most of the time the only one to blame is the original manufacturer.

Toner chips are installed in cartridges to monitor the number of droplets that are released.  So as the toner gets low, the chip will communicate that information with the printer which will then alert the user.  Though this seems like a genuinely helpful tactic that was built to be beneficial, it has not pleased most printer experts like one would hope.  These chips are often set to expire at a certain date so the printer will read that a cartridge is out of toner long before it is.

Some of the “Smart chips” will load into the printer’s memory, so when a cartridge that is not directly from the manufacturer is installed, an error will automatically be given.  Major manufacturers have started implementing this strategy into most new cartridges because it eliminates the third party competitors and forces users to buy OEM replacements.  Sometimes the chip will even deliver false alerts that make users believe that a third party cartridge could or has damaged their printer, which very rarely actually happens.

The Parliament in Europe has banned the use of these chips mainly to increase recycling capabilities and prevent unnecessary waste.  Users can also avoid these deceitful tactics by using a chip re-setter or by purchasing 100% compatible toner cartridges.  The 100% compatibles usually come with a new chip and will avoid the affects of the previous chip recognized by the printer.

There comes a time in every HP LaserJet 2840’s life when the imaging drum or toner cartridge needs to be replaced. However, the drum on this all-in-one machine seems to be somewhat hidden, and many find that replacing the drum is a little tricky. If you’re ready to replace your imaging unit or toner and you want simple instructions, you’ve come to the right place.

The first thing you need to do to replace the drum is open the scanner assembly. You have to do this because the drum literally sits underneath this unit. To open, simply push the scanner-release button.

Now, open the top cover of the machine. Once you find the imaging drum, grasp its handle, and then rotate the drum until its handle is facing upward. Don’t worry if you have to apply a little force to get the unit out—your machine will be just fine.

Next, remove the drum from the all in one by lifting straight up. After you remove it, you may want to put it in a plastic bag so that excess toner doesn’t leak onto your furniture.

You now need to take your new imaging unit out of its packaging, and place it on a sturdy surface. Remove any shipping plastic or labels. At the end of your drum there may be a shipping lock, which you will also need to remove.

Take your new imaging drum and align the arrows on the side of the printer with those on the drum. Lower your drum into place and firmly lock it in.

If you are replacing toners too, open the assembly like before. If the correct toner cartridge is not in position, rotate the carousel until the cartridge you need to replace is in front of you. Pinch the two blue tabs on the side to remove the cartridge from the carousel. Take any sealing tape and packaging of the new cartridge, then squeeze the release levers on the cartridge and lower the toner straight down.

Once you close the top cover and scanner assembly, you are ready to begin printing again!

If you’ve been using OEM cartridges in your inkjet or laser printer and have recently replaced those with remanufactured or compatible products, you may be receiving some sort of error message telling you that the new ink or toner you’ve inserted is not compatible with your machine. It may tell you that the cartridge is not recognized or that you have inserted an incorrect cartridge. However, don’t panic—this simply just means your printer is having trouble reading the new chip on the new cartridge. This is an easy fix and generally doing a cold start will fix this issue right up.

How do you cold start your printer? It’s quite simple.

First, take the ink or toner cartridges out that are not being recognized by your machine. If there is any sort of packaging strip on the cartridge itself, you should take that off and try the cartridge again without that there. If that does not work, go ahead and remove the unrecognized cartridge completely. Make sure you place the cartridge somewhere safe and remember that these cartridges could leak out, so it is important that you put them on some newspaper or an old towel so you do not make a mess.

Next, turn your printer off. Make sure that the light on the printer goes off, ensuring that the printer is in fact turned off. Though most people want to stop at this step you need to finish the cold start completely for success.

Now unplug your printer from its direct power source. The point in this is to clear the memory from your printer completely so your printer is no longer trying to read the cartridges that you have replaced. It is very important that you make sure you leave the printer off and unplugged for at least 10 minutes.

After that, plug the machine back in, put the toner or ink back in and turn the unit back on. After that, it should work out.

Everyone out there is trying to save money. With the economy in the shape it’s currently in, saving a dime has become the prime concern when making purchases for a lot of people. It’s no surprise that keeping your printer up and running can get a little pricey, but sometimes saving money can sacrifice quality, like using refilled ink or toner. If you are trying to save money on printing the only safe option is to go with remanufactured cartridges.

Why are refilled ink and toner cartridges a bad idea? Well, with most refilled cartridges the process of filling the toner or ink is simple—the person refilling drills a hole in the cartridge, puts the ink or toner inside, slaps a sticker on it and calls it day. There is no process or technique to this approach. However, remanufactured cartridges are a once-used genuine cartridge that has been cleaned thoroughly, had all its moving parts replaced (like the chip for instance) and then filled with new toner or ink. Not only is there a process behind this—but a science—to ensure the highest accuracy possible.

Refilled cartridges can lead to all sorts of problems—clogged printheads, streaked printouts and even excessive leakage, which will affect the output of your results. Generally the ink or toner inside is a lower grade product than that in a genuine OEM or remanufactured product. Not to mention these cartridges.

Another very annoying problem that comes into play with refilled cartridges is the way in which they are produced. When cartridges are refilled, a tiny hole must be drilled into the product so that the new ink or toner can be placed inside. However, with drilling that hole comes plastic from the cartridge itself to fall into the ink, meaning your prints will not only have plastic parts on them, but your printer itself can become damaged or broken due to the plastic parts getting loose inside the machine.

Though saving money is always a great idea, doing so with refilled cartridges isn’t. If you want to save money the only safe way is remanufactured.

Inside your standard inkjet or laser printer, you will find one of two things—ink or toner. However, there are a lot of people out there who aren’t entirely sure of which type of cartridge is sitting inside their unit. If you know you have a laser printer, you are using toner. If you are using an inkjet printer, you probably have a cartridge inside filled with ink.

Now that you know what you are using, let’s figure out why you are using it by understanding the difference between a toner cartridge and an ink cartridge.

Let’s start with the most basic differences between the two cartridge types—toner is powder and ink is a liquid.  The powder that makes up toner is a dry mixture filled with a carbon-based material, some plastic particles and coloring agents, all of which come together to make a printed image. A laser printer binds the toner to the paper via the drum, as well as heated rollers that work together during the printing process. The liquid ink inside an inkjet unit is much like the typical ink you would find inside a pen—composed of glycol, water and pigments or dyes. Nozzles on the unit spray this ink out in droplets, which form the image or text.

The price tag on these two cartridges is one of the major differences. You may look at the price of the toner and gasp, but the cost per page using toner is actually a lot more affordable than that of an ink cartridge. Because of this, and the excellent detail exerted for text, toner cartridges supply those in an office or business setting the best. Ink cartridges have a lower cost per page, but are more equipped to create images and photos overall.

Sometimes our printers do funny things. In many cases it’s the printer, and in rare cases, it actually is the HP C9730A toner cartridge. Before going crazy thinking you have a serious problem, you should see if the problem is easily fixable.

If you are experiencing troubles with your laser printer, first and foremost, you need to do a simple test to see if the problem is with your printer or with your toner cartridge. In order to test this, try replacing your current toner cartridge with a new cartridge, and then print a few pages out.

 If the problem goes away after the test, then you potentially have a problem with your toner cartridge. Most times these problems happened at home and are easily fixable. For instance, if your documents are printing with think black lines on the page, this usually means there is a piece of hair in your Brother TN460 toner cartridge.  This is quite a simple fix, just use a Q-tip or a pair of tweezers to remove it. Horizontal white lines mean a foreign object has fallen in the cartridge, usually meaning you have accidently dropped something inside or a part of your printer has fallen in. In these cases, you have probably ruined your toner. If you just put a new cartridge in the machine and the “low toner” light comes on, your problem is most likely that you have put an empty cartridge back inside. If you are sure you put the new cartridge in, remove it and make sure you break the seal that must be pulled before you can print. That is most likely the case.

If the problem persists after the test, it has nothing to do with the cartridge, but there is a problem with the printer itself. A few that sometimes get mistaken for Canon X-25 toner cartridge problems are light prints and small black dots on prints. If your prints are printing too light, you should make sure you are not printing in “toner save” mode. More often than not, this is the problem.  If small black dots are printing, this means that there is a scratch on your drum. In most cases, the problems that occur are due to your printer not your toner cartridge.

Most people don’t realize that if they want their printer toner to last as long as it can, there are certain rules they should be following—especially when it comes to storage.  It’s important to remember, your toner cartridge costs you money, so you don’t want to waste cash or a good product for that matter.

You may be wondering, “How long exactly can a toner cartridge last anyway?” Well, is your Samsung CLP-315 toner cartridge opened or unopened?  Though many people don’t know this, toner cartridges should remain in their original package until you decide to use them.  If they have been opened, their life is only around 6 months.  An unopened cartridge, though, has a shelf life of up to 2 years.  

Buying toner cartridges in bulk can sometimes be a great decision because it can save you or your company money in the long run; however, you must be certain you can use all  the purchased Canon MF6550 toner cartridges in two years or less, or you are out quite a bit of money.  Expired cartridges just won’t print high quality documents, and sometimes, they don’t work at all.

Toner is humidity, light and temperature sensitive so if you plan on storing it, you need to keep these things in mind. While in storage, your cartridges should be stored between 32 degrees and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0 degrees to 32 degrees Celsius.  The humidity should be somewhere between 35-85 percent RH. 

If for some reason you take Brother HL-3040 toner out of the printer to store, make sure it is stored in a protective bag.  It must horizontal.  Do not have it stored standing on an end.  It is very important that it is not exposed to direct sunlight.  Even lighting from a bulb that’s too bright can do damage, so covering a cartridge with paper and storing in a dark drawer is always preferred.

MICR stands for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition.  It is a technology used mainly by banks.  The process was developed as a way for machines to read sequences of numbers that are also readable by humans.  The system is used on almost every check and deposit slip, as a sequence of numbers running along the bottom left.  The first number is most often the bank’s routing number, while the second number is the customer’s account number. 

MICR uses a specific type of toner cartridge with toner that usually includes iron oxide.  The iron oxide in the toner can be magnetized by the machine reading the numbers, in a process very similar to a magnetic tape recorder.  Each character is easily identified by the system, and numbers can even be read when they are obscured by stamps, pencil marks, and other obstructions.  Each character creates a very different waveform when being scanned, so they are easily recognized by the machine.  This can be found on most Dell toner.

The system uses two very specific fonts, known as E-13B and CMC-7.  These fonts contain only numbers and a few other symbols which represent different banking terms such as transit and account number.  There are no letters included in the MICR system.

The most significant part of the MICR system is that it can be read by both humans and machines with almost perfect accuracy.  For example, barcodes can be read very accurately by machines, but not by humans.  Optical character recognition software allows computers to recognize letters and numbers but with a relatively low accuracy rate.  With MICR, less than 1% of documents are unable to be read, and in these cases, the documents can be easily read by humans. 

MICR printers are generally more expensive than traditional laser toner printers, due to their specialized nature.  MICR toner cartridges, however, are more widely available, and using third-party compatible LaserJet toner cartridges or remanufactured cartridges can save quite a bit of money over the long run.

Recycling your toner cartridges may seem like a waste of time or an unimportant task. However, there are many reasons why recycling used ink toner cartridges is a good idea—and most of them can help our environment and the world around us. Currently only about 5% of all inkjet cartridges are being recycled and the rest are being thrown into our landfills.

So why should you recycle your HP P1005 toner cartridge, for instance?

There are many reasons, and one of the best ways to see these reasons is to look at the statistics that come with them. For instance, 25 million printer cartridges go to landfills each month. That probably sounds like a lot, but multiply that by 12 and you’ve got how many cartridges are placed in landfills every year. If all those discarded cartridges in that one year were stacked in a pile, they would be taller than the Sears tower, which is one of the tallest buildings in the world. End-to-end, these cartridges would circle the earth a little over three times. Even more startling is the number 350,000,000 which is how many cartridges in North America alone are discarded into landfills. It also takes about 3.5 quarts of oil to make a new one, such as a Samsung CLP-315 toner cartridge.

The plastics used in printer cartridges take more than 10 centuries to decompose. That means for 1000 years, these toner cartridges will just sit in our landfills taking up space. If you do recycle toner cartridges, you would help save 38,000 tons of metal and plastic from landfills each year.

Most don’t realize that choosing to not recycle is actually hurting themselves—not just in the aspect of the economy, but also when it comes to their pocket books.  Recycling toner cartridges allows manufacturers to produce a high quality product that saves money when you purchase remanufactured products. Recycling actually lowers the cost for purchasing remanufactured cartridges. Plus, you pay taxes for landfills, so recycling can save your tax dollars too—it will actually save you money.

Once you understand how important it is to recycle your cartridges, you should get to work. Remember you’re not only saving yourself money, but you’re saving your resources, one cartridge at a time.