You can certainly call me a laser-printer convert. I’ll never go back to inkjet. I inherited a laserjet from the previous occupant of my room, and have been happy. But now I need to get some more toner 
At least I think so. there was a trough of non-printed area going vertically down the left side.
Knowing that toner is not cheap, I braced for the worst. But really it’s not all that bad! I went to pricewatch.com and found my toner cartridge for about 60 dollars. That doesn’t seem too bad. But what about the generic toners? I saw a few for about 30 bucks.
Anyone have any experience with them? I figure if the generic/refurb whatever toners get half the mileage, then I might as well go with HP because at least I’ll have some kind of quality. But if it’s closer to equal to the HP toners, then why not?
By the way, I’m heavily in favor of generic and cheap stuff when it comes to computers. I have no brand loyalty. When I used to build computers I would just pick the cheapest RAM and MoBo combo and I never got bitten. I realize that some people do, but that’s just the risk you run with generics. But it’s a well-known fact that getting cheap RAM can lead to problems.
So this is why I’m here. Anyone have experience with generic or refurb toner? I should just go for the generic, right?
I’ve never had good luck with off-brand toner. The cheap ones seem to be nothing more than refilled cartridges, as opposed to factory-rebuilt, so they have scratches on the drum, lousy side-to-side coverage, shorter than normal life, etc.
Enterprise-wide, we saved $9 million last year by using a particular brand of recycled printer/copier paper, and 60% of our office supply budget goes to paper and toner. I have no idea how many billions of pages that works out to, but we still go with name-brand cartridges just because they can be depended on to work properly.
Before you replace anything, take your existing cartridge and SLOWLY raise and lower it from side to side a few times (you may want to do this over a newspaper.) Sometimes the toner gets trapped in the baffles inside the tank, which would cause one section to run out early. If that’s the case, you may get a couple of hundred pages more out of your current cartridge.
What I did was take apart my cartridge and pour in more toner from a bottle I got on ebay. I then used that for about 2 years on (light jobs). The only thing that stopped it was the roller got affected so it was streaking all the jobs. I don’t think I had a problem because of the toner. And the bottle was only about $10 with shipping!
I had a generic toner cart fail when the ribbon broke inside it. I’ve never had print quality problems. We have HP printers; I don’t remember the brand of the generic, but it wasn’t Rhino, of which we’ve used many. I had one user complaint on generic, I couldn’t see a problem. I try to avoid them but one of our suppliers will ship them if he doesn’t have HP. I suspect that’s illegal like selling Pepsi at the restaurant as Coca Cola.
I used to be an IT field tech, and I was certified on all of the HP printers in existence in the late nineties. Generic toner carts caused way more problems than normal. In fact, I only recall a couple times that I ran into bad HP carts. Easily hundreds of bad knock offs. Cardinal’s idea intrigues me though. It was never the the knockoff toner that caused the problem, it was the crappy loose fittings and shitty workmanship.