(no subject)

[vxo.livejournal.com]

Dear father:

You are not saving any money by buying those shitty refill toner cartridges off eGhey. As a matter of fact, the next one, if it's like the last, may very well lead to your printer catching fire and taking the house with it.

Ever used a Laserjet 4000/4050? Well, mine is a 4000, upgraded to 4050 by stealing the formatter cage off of a dumpstered 4050 from school that someone decided to try picking up and carrying around by the top cover.

There's a nice little area after the backup roller/drum area where a set of side by side Delrin* bars glide the paper above a metal plate. This area was completely packed with tonershit... imagine the bottom of the cage for a bird with a really bad diet. It had just recently begun leaving skidmarks chopped with a roughly 1/10 inch pattern all over every page.

After finding a vaguely better looking remanufactured cartridge (this one having licensed the Polaroid brand name, apparently!), I unpacked it and pulled the seal strip off. POOF, toner went airborne in a great cloud.

At this point, he admits to me that some of the remanufactured cartridges he's been getting don't have the seal on them.

* Probably, if I know my thermoplastics.

Yeah.... I'm not dealing with his printer anymore.

Comments

[vortex.livejournal.com]

*uuuuugh!*
You really hit one out of the park with this one!

Refilled/Remanufactured cartridges are a huge pet peeve for me! I will not work at a company that uses them, particularly if I know they are successful enough to buy new ones! I've spent more time fixing printer problems from faulty refill/remanufactured cartridges than actually doing my job which was fixing pc problems.

I can't couldn't convince my dad to stop using refills for his InkJet until last week when three of the refills he bought ran out in a day and three more just plain didn't work (even with the "Technique" you are supposed to use to get Lexmark Multi-function Refills to work).

I believe that a refill was the sole cause of the demise of his previous HP Multi-function...

[lightforce.livejournal.com]

Not all remanufactured cartridges are bad. We used cartridges from West Point Products in the computer labs at my university until recently, and they have a pretty low rate of failure. The cost savings is definitely worth the trouble when you're going through a couple dozen cartridges a month, and I'm pretty sure we were credited/refunded for faulty cartridges.

[jecook]

We use the ones our service company sell us. Not surprisingly, they tend to keep their mouths shut when dealing with toner leaks. And overall, they are not all that bad- I've not seen a lot of them leak.

Fortunately, we are moving to a different service company.

[vxo.livejournal.com]

West Point Products, huh? I'll give them a try, if it turns out I get a say in the matter.

The ones he's been buying are really ghetto, as in, unlabelled box, cartridge in a random poly bag, HP logo on cartridge label scratched out with a Sharpie... urrrghhh.

[vxo.livejournal.com]

Was that one of them with the printheads in the cartridge, or just the ink tanks?

I've had really good luck with refilling the printhead-in-cartridge kind myself. They usually last for 4-5 refills. The only downside is that I NEVER remember to wear gloves, so I wind up with dalmation hands.

[vortex.livejournal.com]

Printhead in the cartridge for both.

HP was -) HP Officejet D series (- (http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/in/en/ho/WF10a/18972-18972-238444-3328086-3328086-64982.html).

Lexmark is a -) Lexmark 8300 Series (- (http://www.lexmark.com/publications/eng/8300/index.html)

The Lexmark cartridges have a chip in them with a rewritable-code. The printers record the code and modify it to prevent the printer from printing, or other functons like showing the ink level, if the cartridge was previously empty. This is of course done by Lexmark to force you to buy their own cartridges...

[vortex.livejournal.com]

When I worked for experian (94'97) and when I worked for BellSouth (97'-00') and Internet Security Systems (02'-05'), all at some point used refurbished/refilled cartridges for our Laserjets.

We had problems ranging from paper jams at/in the cartridge, toner explosions, defective rollers on the cartridges that would leave streaks and damage the Fuser to cartridges with damaged gears that would damage the gears in the printer.

I don't trust them at all.

Yeah, you might save $10-$20 per cartridge and that adds up over time, but at what cost if you have to replace a $4,000-$5,000 Laser Printer...