Over the years I’ve tried multiple alternatives, including refilling cartridges with bottles of toner, and have never gotten a result as good as actual Brother cartridges.
I’ve finally concluded poor quality wasn’t a good trade for saving a few bucks. After all, a Brother cartridge will print text on a couple of boxes of paper before it needs replacing.
It’s just not worth saving tiny fractions of a cent per page for crap results.
My last toner refill was a 90g bottle of TN-450 compatible SOL Corp, non-OEM, toner that I bought on Amazon for $5, two years ago. It was the first refill to the half-filled starter cartridge that came with the printer I purchased new.
I’ve shake-leveled the cartridge & cleaned the corona wire . The refill toner does not print as black as the original toner, and I now get long thin white vertical streaks through any large black print area.
briankk, TheCipher:
I’ve been printing at 300x300 dpi, non-draft mode. I tried 600x600, but that didn’t seem to make a difference.
tumblindice:
Thanks for your suggestion. Made me smile.
catnipman:
My HL-2270DW only has under 2k pages on it. I bought it new in 2013 so my usage is low. Amazon has a new, genuine Brother TN-450 cartridge for $45. Its expected life is 2.6k pages ($ 0.0017 per page). I’ll probably take your suggestion and buy that.
BTW, Ten plus years ago I bought some bulk toner from an eBay seller for a different printer. That toner was of dubious quality… Believe it or not, it came in a used plastic water bottle. My printer was a free-after-rebate laser printer, and really I needed to use it. So I poured the “new” toner into the cartridge. To my horror, I saw a 0.25” ball of what looked like sweater fuzz go into the tank…