Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
OEM toner cartridges have a designed service life equal to a little bit more than the quantity of toner inside. You can refill them, but you are using a worn-out drum, risking damage (sometimes irreparable) to the printer itself if a seal fails and dumps all the toner into the guts of the printer.


Yeah, I'm convinced that's FUD. Wikipedia says:
Quote:
Low-end to mid-range laser printers typically contain two consumable parts: the toner cartridge itself (which has a typical life of 2,000 pages) and the drum unit (a typical life of 40,000 pages). Some toner cartridges incorporate the drum unit in the design and therefore replacing the toner means replacing the drum unit every single time, although some consider this type unessential and therefore not cost-effective.


As far as I know, the worst thing that will happen when your imaging drum gets old and worn out is that your printed pages will start to get a faded look to them, with the black parts not being quite as black as they should be. So if you do hack it to refill the toner without replacing the drum, even if you don't replace the drum when you should be, you're not really risking much. That's been my understanding for a long time.

And the risk? If things go bad and you ruin the printer, now you just have to buy another cheap laser printer that didn't cost much to begin with.

For me, the only reason not to hack the system to get around the toner/drum disparity, is that it's just simpler and easier to use them as-intended.
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Tony Fabris