I’m thinking of this in terms of time, and assuming most of the Teeming Millions who have a laser printer don’t have it churning out hundreds of pages per day. How long does the toner cartridge usually last? A week? a month? Hey, new ones cost about $60!
Cartridges vary wildly in their capacity, so you’d need to be more specific about the brand, but for personal laser printers, expect about 1500- 5000 pages between changes. For me that’s about a year on my HP 1300, which my wife I use as my primary printer, and approximately the rest of my life on my Brother fax machine, which we use as an occasional photocopier.
The printer’s web site or box should tell you the expected life of a cartridge, in 5% coverage pages (roughly text or simple web pages. If you’re printing pictures most of the time, divide the number by 10 or more).
My brother HL-1850 uses a cartridge every two years or so, but I don’t print that much.
Plus within a brand, the different series may have the same wide variation of capacities. beowulff’s HL1850 for instance can use TN530 (3,000 page) or TN560 (6,000 page, at 5% coverage). On top of that sometimes a printer will come out of the box with a “starter” toner cartridge, of lower yield than the standard issue.
My Brother HL-1440 that I bought 4 years ago still has the original toner cartridge in it, and I think that it was one of those starter ones that has less toner than a “real” one.
It complains of low toner constantly and has for the past year or so, but still does fine. Sometimes I have to take out the cartridge and shake it a bit to make it stop complaining.
Compare this to my sisters “All-in-one” inkjet dealie that she buys new ink for almost monthly @ 30 bucks a pop.
I know how * that* goes; I already had a Lexmark Z-22, which now shares the printing with the Brother. One reason is it prints in color, which the Brother model doesn’t do. And its inkjet cartridges cost about $30 each!
Well, if you print a lot a laser is the way to go - as a matter of fact, I have a Brother HL-1435 that I’ve had for over four years and is probably going to die soon. For convenience, I get the high-yield TN-460 cartridges at about $40 a pop if I buy them online.
Thing is, it was a $150 printer, and the drum kit (over $100 to replace I’ve generally seen) is nearly done. So, there’s one of your hidden costs on a laser.
And don’t mix up the drum and the cartridge. Totally different.
-Joe
I haven’t used the Brother for a while now. After I tried (successfully) to get it to print on greeting-card weight paper (for a legal brief), and then reset it to print on regular paper again, it had picked up the sheets of regular paper and spit them through the rollers unprinted, until the tray is empty.
Then, when I refill the tray, iit repeats the process.
Anybody have this happen? 
Do you mean, if you ask it to print one copy, it keeps feeding paper until the tray is empty? That would be really bizarre.
No, I mean it “prints” the pages–sending them unprinted through the rollers, until the tray is empty–without any kind of prompt. The only way to stop it is to switch the printer off.
Sounds like a possible paper-feed switch problem to me. Poke around and see if any of the sensors are jammed, blocked, or mis-aligned.
And where do I find these sensors on the HL 2040?
I don’t know.
I’m an engineer, which means I just start taking stuff apart, and worry about getting it back together later. You might be better off taking it into a repair shop.
All the carts I know about for recent vintage home-quality laser printers integrate the drum with the toner cart. Older and commercial grade printers/copiers may separate the drum (infrequent replacement, expensive) from the toner (frequent replacement, cheap).
My HP Laserjet 6MP is about 15 years old and in daily use (Original cost, $1200 including a Postscript interpreter and extra RAM). The counter says over 120,000 copies. Far superior, faster, quieter and cheaper to run than the new, $100 color inkjet I have next to it. And the ink doesn’t run when the paper gets wet. I love it.
I have the Brother HL-2070N, which is the networked version of their low-end laser. It is awesome.
To the question, I have printed 270 pages, and that is 2.3% of the drum. Probably an average mix of page coverage, with “Toner Save” on, whatever that is.
It’s amazing how “professional” this thing is for $100. Like it tracks the page count and all sorts of junk. I’ve had 3 paper jams, and I’ve printed 10 envelopes. And it appears there is a new model (HL-2170w) that does wireless too. For $120. I bought the laser because I didn’t use an inkjet enough for it to be convenient… it would tend to need head cleaning every time I wanted to use it wasted tons of ink and took forever. The laser is so much better.
Since the last posting, I have had the problem with the laser printer corrected. There were “too many printer drivers” and a print job had an error in it, stalling the process and backing up everything behind it, like cars on a freeway onramp. To find this out cost me $45.