Laser Speed Office Savings

Can a compatible toner cartridge really save me money?
The most expensive part of owning a laser printer is purchasing toner cartridges. You can expect to pay seven times more for your toner cartridges than you paid for your laser printer. Over the five year life expectancy, compatible toner cartridges will cut your cost in half

How do I help the environment by purchasing compatible toner cartridges?
Each empty toner cartridge adds approximately 4 pounds of waste to a landfill. Because the cartridge is primarily composed of plastic, it will take over 1,000 years to decompose. In addition, it takes three quarts of oil to manufacture a new toner cartridge. The economy will save over twenty million gallons of oil a year because of compatible and remanufactured toner cartridges.

How are compatible toner cartridges different from just a few years ago?
The technology used to produce compatible toner cartridges is now as good as the technology used to create OEM toner cartridges. The days of drill and fill are over. Reputable toner companies use many of the same components as outlined in OEM specifications, i.e., toner, new drums, rollers, etc

What does remanufactured cartridge mean?
Recycled cartridges that are disassembled by third parties (other than OEMs) and have their worn parts replaced are called remanufactured cartridges. To guarantee print quality, remanufactured cartridges are refilled, tested in the factory and repackaged.

Why didn't my cartridge print the full amount of pages? Why was the yield lower than what was quoted online?
Customers often worry about the yield of their cartridges. They often mistakenly try to track yield by time. The amount of time it takes for a cartridge to go empty is a bad indicator of yield. The cited yield for ink and toner cartridges is given at 5% coverage. This is usually not a lot of print on a page. Typically only a short memo is at 5% coverage. If you are printing letters, using legal size paper, printing photos, web pages or doing any kind of graphics your coverage will vary greatly. This will cause the yield to drop greatly.

Sometimes a customer will ask me why they only got 500 pages from their cartridge instead of the advertised 2000 pages. This is when I need to explain that the 2000 page is based on 5% coverage, which is what most OEM manufacturers rate thier cartridges at. Some manufacturers rate thier colour toner cartridges at an even lower 3% coverage. 5% coverage really doesn't cover much of the page and when you print a full page of text at 10 point text, you are actually getting around 20% and up coverage, in which case your page count goes down.

When you add photos or graphics to the page, your page count goes down even more dramatically, sometimes as high as 90% coverage for full page photos or graphics. Indeed, I had one customer that came back to me recently saying I must have sold him an empty cartridge as he only got several hundred pages instead of the 3000 page the cartridge was rated at. When I asked him for a sample of what he was printing with that cartridge, he showed me a printout and it turned out he was printing hundreds of flyers with a half page photo in greyscale and the other half with solid graphics and bold text. I explained to him about the 5% coverage and showed him a sample sheet (shown below) and he immediately understood where I was coming from. So please, before you claim the cartridge is defective or prematurely empty, check your printing habits and graphics.

There are two ways to properly check for yield. First is to utilize any page count your printer has. Refer the user's manual for instructions. The other way is to count reams or boxes of paper you have used with each cartridge. Both of these methods will tell you how many pages per cartridge you are using.