Where to get cheap toner?

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PuddinAndPeanuts

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Name brand printer toner is hideously expensive, but most of the off-brand toner I've bought online has been too low quality for me to use for labels (mostly streaking problems when printing). Does anyone have a budget friendly but reliable source for cheap toner online?

Thanks!
 
Do you use an ink jet or laser jet printer?

I can't help with price but just want to point out that the laser jet printers are much more efficient and the toner lasts much longer. My dad is still using printers from the early 90's (old enough the model number no longer appears in the options to hook up a printer) and to my knowledge he's only needed to change the toner 2-3x in 25 years - even with 3 kids printing up school essays. 90% of the time shaking the toner bar redistributes the ink and you can get another 100 sheets printed.
 
I buy the toner for my older Oki at Ldproducts.com. When I purchased my printer I did not worry about the cost of replacing the consumables but now I have to. I pay 24.99 per after market cartridge versus 104.00 for OEM. With my amount of printing I have to change color cartridges at least twice per year. LD cartridges are decent and if you receive a bad one they promptly replace. If you are looking for OEM toners I find they are within a few dollars no matter where you purchase them. I assume you have a laser since you mentioned toner. I acquired my daughters Oki which is the same as mine and hers still had OEM toners. Quality print does not warrant me purchasing OEM over my aftermarket toners

Sorry I was no help of where to purchase OEM. Word of advice to anyone thinking laser printers, check how many consumables need to be replaced. Mine has 4 toner, 4 drums and the main fuser drum so it is very costly when everything has to be changed.
 
You may not like this answer, but I'll tell you anyway.

I used to work as the supervisor of PC and printer repairs for a company with approximately 150 offices spread over my state, servicing about 400 laser printers. I had four technicians working for me throughout the state and we were committed on-site service within 8 hours. The company paid for parts and I paid for labor and mileage. After about a year of operation, I found that printer problems were our Number One service call - by far - and most of them were for poor print quality which was resolved by simply changing the toner cartridge. The company was purchasing refilled toner to save the parts cost, but I was eating all that labor and mileage.

So I began a 2-year study collecting data to prove that these refilled toners were no good. It's been a few years and details are lost to time, but I collected somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 incidents worth of data. I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that refilled toner lasted, on average, only half as long as OEM toner, and that print quality was almost invariably worse almost from the beginning. Eventually it would deteriorate to the point the clients would no longer accept is and the toner would need changed before it was actually empty. I proved that even without the labor and mileage the refilled toners were more expensive because of their shorter life. I made a big presentation of all this data, but because of the way the contract was set up, the company was not willing to make the change. I changed my process and started leaving replacements with the office receptionists so they could make the change and most of our travelling service calls were no longer necessary.

So the short answer is: Buy the OEM toner and you will get full life and high quality throughout. As BattleGnome says, a modern printer should get at least 10,000 pages before needing a new toner (at the ISO standard of 5% coverage). For a $100 toner, that's just a penny per page. The paper costs four or five times as much - for cheap paper.

Now with the short answer out of the way, here's the WHY:

A typical toner cartridge contains a toner reservoir, a waste reservoir, and the imaging drum. Refill operations almost always empty the waste container and refill the toner reservoir (often re-using the actual toner) but do not replace the imaging drum. The imaging drum is an electrically- and light-reactive surface that works through static charge. To make an image, an electric charge is applied to the drum and the laser hits the surface to "draw" the image as a static charge. Then that portion of the drum is dragged through a toner bath and toner particles stick via static attraction. Then as the drum rolls around to contact the paper, the charge is negated so that the toner particles release from the drum and attach to the paper (which at this point is given a charge). Later in the paper path, a heated fuser will melt the toner and fix it to the paper. Then that portion of the imaging drum needs to be "reset" and cleared of the previous image so it's ready for the next bit of the image.

So the problems start when refill companies don't replace that imaging drum. The drums are engineered by printer companies to last as long as the toner particles last - with just a bit of extra time for redundancy. They're not intended to last for two or three refills of the toner, so they start to degrade. Maybe they don't take the charge as well and you get light printing. Maybe they don't clear charge the way they should and you get ghosting from the last revolution of the roller. Maybe they develop a general charge bias on the whole roller so you get an overall grayish cast to your prints. Maybe they get a knick or scratch that always holds a bit of toner so you get a repeating defect every time that spot rolls around (six or eight times per page) or even a line all the way down. You might even luck out and get a particular drum that's built better than standard and have good prints for an entire refill, but on average, that's not the case.

You can find toner companies advertised as "remanufactured" instead of just refilled which usually means that they replace the drum with a new one of their making. They are more expensive than simple refills, but cheaper than OEM. I still don't recommend these because the third-party drums do not perform as well as OEM ones; their quality is spotty and over time you'll probably just break-even compared to new. But if you're insistent on not buying OEM, definitely go this route. If you do, make sure you find an actual claim of replaced drums and don't rely on the "remanufactured" description alone.

With all that said, some brands separate the drum and toner into different maintenance items. In that case, a replacement toner cartridge is just a plastic box of toner and you should, by all means, use the cheap refills of toner but buy OEM drums. You can usually tell by seeing if toner cartridge and imaging drum are separate items on your printer's supplies parts list. Failing that, opening the flaps on the cartridge (carefully) will reveal the drum if it exists. They are usually a blueish, greenish, or grey roller with a translucent "depth" to them. Finally, you can just call the customer service number for your printer and ask them.
 
...
Sorry I was no help of where to purchase OEM. Word of advice to anyone thinking laser printers, check how many consumables need to be replaced. Mine has 4 toner, 4 drums and the main fuser drum so it is very costly when everything has to be changed.
Your luck with refilled toner can be explained by my emphasis above. Toner itself it just colored plastic sand, and they're all about the same. With CMYK color, you may see tiny variations in the actual CMY colors, but the difference is not worth the cost, as you've said.
 
Your luck with refilled toner can be explained by my emphasis above. Toner itself it just colored plastic sand, and they're all about the same. With CMYK color, you may see tiny variations in the actual CMY colors, but the difference is not worth the cost, as you've said.
Thankyou, yes I do purchase OEM drums. So I guess I am lucky to have separate drums with each cartridge
 
We saved a ton switching from cheap inkjet printers to laser jet. Laserjet doesn't dry out if its not used, and you get so many more copies at much better quality. If we need color (twice a year) we go to kinkos or whatever.
 
While the OP was about lasers, I feel this is a good spot to mention inkjet printers as well, as regards to refill ink vs OEM.

As background, after the job I discussed above I have worked for the past 10 years for one of the major manufacturers of inkjet printers, in the repair operation. My current job is in data analysis, but for the first 8 years here I was in the management of the repair operation, including quality, defects and customer complaints. The facility repairs on the order of 150,000 individual units per year, so I have tons and tons of experience with inkjets.

So, should you buy 3rd party ink or OEM? The short answer is, probably - but with some meaningful caveats.

Printer ink in an incredibly precise thing. Print heads pump out picoliters of fluid tens of millions of times per page to draw your letters through holes that are sized in micrometers. Things like the viscosity of the fluid and surface tension matter a lot at that scale. Dry rate is also very important to avoid smudging, gumming the print head, or in extreme cases cockling of the page itself. (Cockling is the actual page changing shape because of the wet ink. You can see it by printing a big block of dark color; the wetness and deformity are cockling.) Ink formulas are the most-protected IP in printer companies, and anything sold by another company will be a recipe of theirs, not a duplicate of the OEM.

There are two types of ink as well, dye and pigment. Dye is a solution which is absorbed into the paper and colors the fibers (or gel surface for coated photo paper). Pigments are microscopic pieces of colored "stuff" suspended in a solution which sit on top of the paper rather than being absorbed like a dye would be. Either technology is fine for good prints, but the choice should be matched with the printer's design. Most new inkjets are currently being designed for pigment because it lasts longer without fading, but dye is much cheaper to produce. That means that almost all 3rd party ink is going to be dye - which can cause problems when the printer is designed to use pigment. Color match is also almost never the same with 3rd party ink as with OEM.

So the absolutely correct answer is that one should use OEM ink for best image quality, and most especially life of the printer. If it is important for you to match color exactly, or if you're producing photos that you want to last for years, or if you have a very expensive inkjet printer, you should use OEM ink.

But if you're not doing any of those things, if you're just printing kids' papers for school and random stuff you want to carry around in hardcopy, the price difference between OEM and 3rd party can be large enough to justify 3rd party. If you're using last-year's entry model printer bought for $60 or so, buying OEM ink twice will cost as much as a new printer. At that point you can consider the printer itself almost sacrificial. It will not last as long as it should with OEM ink and print quality will suffer slightly, but running 3 or 4 sets of 3rd party ink then buying a new printer becomes the cost-effective option. In fact, this math typically holds up to printer prices around $100. It may not be the most environmentally sound option, but it's cheaper.

As an example, even though I have access to employee prices for ink, I would still use 3rd party in my home printer - especially when the kids were younger and would print 14 color-heavy pages of a web page by accident. The price for that was reduced life of print heads and worsening image quality, so that I'd have to replace print heads every couple of years. (Of course, I can do that really cheaply; you most likely can't.) By contrast, the printer on my desk at work lasted over six years with nothing but occasional cleanings because it was always fed OEM ink.

So TL;DR is that OEM ink is always better, but for most of us typical users it's not better enough to justify its price premium.
 
Great info Brewer George. I have a question, what is your opinion of the Epson Printers with the Ecotank? I have been considering changing out one of my color lasers for one. Have you had any experience with them?
 
You may not like this answer, but I'll tell you anyway.

I used to work as the supervisor of PC and printer repairs for a company with approximately 150 offices spread over my state, servicing about 400 laser printers. I had four technicians working for me throughout the state and we were committed on-site service within 8 hours. The company paid for parts and I paid for labor and mileage. After about a year of operation, I found that printer problems were our Number One service call - by far - and most of them were for poor print quality which was resolved by simply changing the toner cartridge. The company was purchasing refilled toner to save the parts cost, but I was eating all that labor and mileage.

So I began a 2-year study collecting data to prove that these refilled toners were no good. It's been a few years and details are lost to time, but I collected somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 incidents worth of data. I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that refilled toner lasted, on average, only half as long as OEM toner, and that print quality was almost invariably worse almost from the beginning. Eventually it would deteriorate to the point the clients would no longer accept is and the toner would need changed before it was actually empty. I proved that even without the labor and mileage the refilled toners were more expensive because of their shorter life. I made a big presentation of all this data, but because of the way the contract was set up, the company was not willing to make the change. I changed my process and started leaving replacements with the office receptionists so they could make the change and most of our travelling service calls were no longer necessary.

So the short answer is: Buy the OEM toner and you will get full life and high quality throughout. As BattleGnome says, a modern printer should get at least 10,000 pages before needing a new toner (at the ISO standard of 5% coverage). For a $100 toner, that's just a penny per page. The paper costs four or five times as much - for cheap paper.

Now with the short answer out of the way, here's the WHY:

A typical toner cartridge contains a toner reservoir, a waste reservoir, and the imaging drum. Refill operations almost always empty the waste container and refill the toner reservoir (often re-using the actual toner) but do not replace the imaging drum. The imaging drum is an electrically- and light-reactive surface that works through static charge. To make an image, an electric charge is applied to the drum and the laser hits the surface to "draw" the image as a static charge. Then that portion of the drum is dragged through a toner bath and toner particles stick via static attraction. Then as the drum rolls around to contact the paper, the charge is negated so that the toner particles release from the drum and attach to the paper (which at this point is given a charge). Later in the paper path, a heated fuser will melt the toner and fix it to the paper. Then that portion of the imaging drum needs to be "reset" and cleared of the previous image so it's ready for the next bit of the image.

So the problems start when refill companies don't replace that imaging drum. The drums are engineered by printer companies to last as long as the toner particles last - with just a bit of extra time for redundancy. They're not intended to last for two or three refills of the toner, so they start to degrade. Maybe they don't take the charge as well and you get light printing. Maybe they don't clear charge the way they should and you get ghosting from the last revolution of the roller. Maybe they develop a general charge bias on the whole roller so you get an overall grayish cast to your prints. Maybe they get a knick or scratch that always holds a bit of toner so you get a repeating defect every time that spot rolls around (six or eight times per page) or even a line all the way down. You might even luck out and get a particular drum that's built better than standard and have good prints for an entire refill, but on average, that's not the case.

You can find toner companies advertised as "remanufactured" instead of just refilled which usually means that they replace the drum with a new one of their making. They are more expensive than simple refills, but cheaper than OEM. I still don't recommend these because the third-party drums do not perform as well as OEM ones; their quality is spotty and over time you'll probably just break-even compared to new. But if you're insistent on not buying OEM, definitely go this route. If you do, make sure you find an actual claim of replaced drums and don't rely on the "remanufactured" description alone.

With all that said, some brands separate the drum and toner into different maintenance items. In that case, a replacement toner cartridge is just a plastic box of toner and you should, by all means, use the cheap refills of toner but buy OEM drums. You can usually tell by seeing if toner cartridge and imaging drum are separate items on your printer's supplies parts list. Failing that, opening the flaps on the cartridge (carefully) will reveal the drum if it exists. They are usually a blueish, greenish, or grey roller with a translucent "depth" to them. Finally, you can just call the customer service number for your printer and ask them.


Thank you so much- I appreciate you giving me the "why" along with it. I'll bite the bullet and buy brand name from now on.
 
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