All Laser Toners are Same

This is a bit like asking, "Are all cars the same?". Conceptually, they all get the same job done in same way. But practically, what we've got is thousands of incompatible cars from different manufacturers. A Ford Mondeo distributor won't work in the Peugeot 306, and probably not even in a Ford Focus. It's the same with laser printers.

True, you can put the same petrol in a lot of different cars, but this is more analogous to mains electricity in the case of laser printers. Click on a few colour laser printers listed on our web site. It won't be long before you find quite a few that are "under development". If we had one distributor that would fit in any car, we wouldn't have so many products under development, we wouldn't need a fully equipped lab with three people working in it and life would be a lot simpler.

Most of the poor customer experiences seen, now that there's a whole toner refill market out there, are caused by a naive "next in the family" approach. Internet shop-fronts with questionable toner background and presumably no research resources assumed the Epson C1100 would run on Epson C900 toner, that the Magicolor 3100 would run on Magicolor 2300 toner and so on. Interestingly, in both these cases, they do work for about 400 pages or so until the incoming toner actually gets through all the tubes and enters the developer chamber. At that point, if the invading toner isn't the right one, your refill is headed south - and it's probably taking your laser printer with it.

Will I get the same number of prints?

Other things being equal, the weight of toner powder determines the volume of output. We weigh the toner in original cartridges and mimic them. The weight of toner in one of our bottles has to be right for that cartridge. Too little would lead to low yield and a dissatisfied you. Too much leads to overfilling, spillage and developer roller leak problems. Some manufacturers insist on confusing everyone except their own teckies by offering cartridges of different yields for the same laser printer. For technical reasons, we sometimes mimic the lower yield, but if we can, the higher. These issues are stated in the price list if and when they apply.

Will the quality be as good?

We swig from our own medicine bottle. In fact, we'd be just about bankrupt if we didn't print with D.I.Y. refilled cartridges. Most of our instruction booklets and catalogues - all of them in colour these days - are printed during final "soak testing" of a soon-to-be-released product.

But we're the site that levels with you, aren't we? So:

In the vast majority of cases we have a toner offering which is indistinguishable on the page from the original.

In a minority of cases we have a toner offering which is indistinguishable for most practical applications, but which might not satisfy very exacting standards of half-tone segregation, overall lustre and the exact pantone continuity of the original toner.

We only ever test toners on bog-standard A4 copier paper and cannot guarantee their performance on other substrates such as labels, card, acetate etc.

In cases of genuine dissatisfaction, we'll let you draw the line on quality. We'll seek to understand where you're drawing that line, then we'll ask you to return any toner bottles you haven't used yet and then refund your money for everything you weren't satisfied with.