I can get "re-manufactured" and/or "compatible" toner cartridges for my HP Laserjet 1300 for about £34 delivered, price for the HP-brand is nearer £48. Anybody using these? Any problems?
Or you could go CRAZY: http://www.lasertonerrefill.co.uk/hp_1300_toner_refill_kit.htm My mums old Epson EPL-5800L was refilled regularly, it was a pop cap job so was piss easy to do.
Could be hit-and-a-miss. I was getting "remanufactured" cartridges for my LaserJet 5100, and they lasted about half as long as the normal ones do. Plus the toner wasn't pitch black enough. In my line of work, where outputted seps have to be black, this is bad. But they seem to work okay for normal office-type use. Be careful of leaky toner powder though.
I had my Laserjet 5 refiled at one of those yellow printer shops for like £40 never had a problem with it.
£40 for a refill? Holy crap those places really do charge an arm and a leg. £12 for a refill bottle and do it yourself tbh I've refilled my Samsung toner 3 times now and it's not too bad though I think the powder I got this time was a little crap, so in short, re-manufactured is find but I'd be inclined to do it yourself. The best toner I purchased was from http://www.refilltoner.com/ They ARE a little more expensive than other places but their quality is very good, nice black levels.
Yeah, I'd go for the £12 refill bottle too. It's really easy on some - mine refills just by opening a little cap on the side. IIRC, HP cartridges might be a little more difficult - some you have to cut a little circle in to refill it with.
It depends entirely on how often you change toner cartridges tbh. If you only change the cartridge one a year it should be ok but if you go through them pretty quickly i would stick with genuine HP considering the low difference in price. Bear in mind that the majority of the work is done by the toner cartridge, not the printer itself so a crappy cartridge = crappy prints. On the site i administer we have over 200 HP laser printers and as a cost cutting measure we tried using refilled toner cartridges. Big mistake! Print quality is poorer, they last about half as long and either leak all over the place or cause printing issues. We have now advised everyone to go back to genuine HP cartridges although a few departments still insist on using refills and the call outs for printing issues is definetly a lot higher with them and are often fixed by swapping out the cartridges for a genuine HP one. We also had an issue where a refilled magenta toner cartridge literally burst open inside a colour laser and completely filled the insides with toner. The supplier of the toner eventually admitted liability and paid for the thing to be cleaned out and serviced by HP.
Just remember that the toner cartridge on a laser printer usually includes the imaging drum and a few other consumable parts that are meant to be replaced as often as the toner is. I suspect your remanufactured cartridges are just refills, so print quality might go downhill after a while, since your other consumable parts aren't getting replaced often enough. I can totally understand using refills for an inkjet since those cartridges last ten or fifteen seconds and cost more than the printer, but since you only replace laser toner once every few years you might as well spring for the brand-name and be sure you won't have any problems. On the other hand, I've had a lot of problems with inkjet refills, which tend to dry out - that's not a problem you'll run into with a toner refill.
What I find on most refillable printers is that the photographic drum is a seperate unit with it's own life cycle.
