How to quickly change a cartridge in a printer

The difference in price between original cartridges for printers and MFPs and all kinds of refueling options is quite large: a third-party cartridge will cost 30–70% less than the original, and refilling can cost ten times less than a new branded cartridge. On this difference, the huge market for non-original consumables for printing equipment lives, and the black market for counterfeits feeds from it. But is it really possible to save money by buying cheap consumables and using a secondary gas station? Everything in order.

There are much fewer manufacturers of office equipment on the market than manufacturers of consumables: the former can be counted on one hand, the latter in Russia in 2017 were represented by more than a hundred. The first are transnational corporations operating in many countries of the world. While most of the manufacturers of compatible cartridges are small companies: sometimes they are the owners of only one or two factories. The size of the business affects the opportunities: the big players have the money to automate and adhere to the technology, the small ones do not. In the case of cartridges for printing technology, automation (read: expensive machines and industrial robots) is the key to quality.

The cartridge is a precision technique with tolerances measured in microns. This is exactly the case when “hand assembly” is not a compliment to the product, but vice versa. Individual parts are not produced manually, but on CNC machines, and robots have long been engaged in assembling cartridges from official manufacturers – manipulator arms with laser vision.

The production of a cartridge for a laser printer is a chain of fifty operations, each of which requires a separate (and very expensive) machine. It is extremely difficult to build such a conveyor without being a giant corporation, so the level of automation for small manufacturers is much lower. And this means that the parts are connected by hand, and the seams that the robot makes with a laser are made by a worker in a small production. The worker is a man: he can forget, he generates dust – particles of skin, hair, eyelashes. And robots are sterile. Few small manufacturers are able to provide the level of automation they need, but even these lack the main advantage of large companies – information.

A company that produces a printer or MFP develops the printer itself, and the cartridge for it, and ink or toner – as a rule, the same engineers are engaged in this. They have the ability to select toner in accordance with the charge applied to the drum, and adapt the ink composition to the properties of the brand of silicone from which they decided to make a capillary ink delivery system to the print head. Small manufacturers do not have this information – they only have a printer and original spare parts as a role model. 

In an inkjet printer, ink is truly ink: a colored liquid that the print head applies drop by drop to the desired areas of the page. But this does not mean that the composition of the ink is simple. Due to the large number of moving parts, very high requirements are imposed on ink: they must move freely along thin capillaries, in no case dry out or stick to the printer parts. The composition of surfactants, which is part of the ink, relieves of stickiness, bactericidal components from bacteria and fungi, moisturizers from drying out, etc.

The ink must meet a number of specified parameters, here are just a few of them:

The print head contains thousands or even tens of thousands of nozzles that emit millions of ink droplets per second; any deviations in the composition of the ink will inevitably affect the print quality – if they do not break the printer at all.

Commentary by Pavel Anokhin, CEO of HP Inc. in Russia: One of the key parameters of inkjet printing is the size of the drop formed by the head (the drop volume is measured in picoliters – 10 ^-12  liters – Ed.). The print quality directly depends on it. In order for each of the nozzles to be able to produce a drop of the required size at the right time, the properties of the ink must be unchanged. This is physically impossible to achieve without knowing their exact composition and the entire production technology. The difficulty in achieving these unique properties is the main reason for the relatively high cost of inkjet cartridges. 

As conceived by any manufacturer, the cartridge is a disposable black box: in theory, the user has no idea where the ink is poured. When they run out, a new cartridge is bought – and no hassle. Its service life is limited by the supply of toner or ink: out of ink – it’s time to change the cartridge. But cartridges are expensive and ink is cheap, so the popular love for manual refueling is still alive today. 

In general, an inkjet printer can survive several cartridge refills, but there are a few nuances here. First, the ink can overflow or overflow. In the first case, you just print fewer pages; in the second, ink can flood the printer and even the furniture around. Depending on the design of the cartridge, the ink is held in it either by a sponge, or by compressed air, or due to the difference in pressure inside and outside – but there is no particular difference: a bad master is able to violate the integrity of any cartridge.

Secondly, the ink itself. You cannot buy original ones, they are packaged only in new cartridges. Always refuel with some other. One of the most common troubles with these others is quick drying. It is more dangerous than it seems, and here’s why.

The ink is a water-based liquid. Water evaporates at room temperature, and this is extremely difficult to resist. Manufacturers have been conjuring over formulations for years, adding various surfactants and wetting agents, and achieve good results. Even with a downtime of several months, the original ink will not dry either in the cartridge or, more importantly, in the print head. Different brands have different approaches to the placement of the printhead: someone puts it in the cartridge, someone makes it part of the printer. And if the ink has dried in the print head combined with the cartridge, then that’s half the trouble: you can just throw out such a cartridge and buy a new one. But if everything has dried up in the print head, which is in the printer, then the device itself will have to be thrown away: changing the head can be more expensive than buying a new printer or MFP.

Many people still call toner ink out of habit, and consider a laser printer cartridge a complex container for them, but in reality everything is much more complicated. A laser printer creates an image by causing solid toner particles to settle on the paper. To do this, the sheet is rolled between two surfaces, on one of which the required set of point electrostatic charges is preliminarily applied, and a voltage of opposite polarity is applied to the other. 

For the image to be of high quality, the toner particles must behave in the electromagnetic field exactly as the printer design suggests. In this case, the toner particles need:

The last stage of printing – fusing on paper – makes its own demands on the toner. At this stage, the printed sheet is passed between the hot roll and the pressure roll. The hot roller melts the toner, the air cools just as quickly, and the toner is permanently fused into the paper. The melting and solidification temperature of the toner particles must match the temperature of the roller, otherwise the image will quickly smear after exiting the printer or, conversely, crumble from the page. Poor toner often adheres to the pressure roller so hard that the cleaning system fails. Particles adhered to leave marks when printing the following documents. The service technician can diagnose the problem by the characteristic stripes and advise you to replace the entire fuser, and this will cost much more than buying an original cartridge.

Laser printer cartridges, although they look like a part from a spacecraft, according to the manufacturer’s plan, they are disposable: if you have worked your way out, go for recycling. But they cost a lot, so craftsmen have long learned to fill up a new toner cheaply. This is done using an “innovative” technology: the cartridge is disassembled, the toner is poured and reassembled. The design of the cartridge is most often non-separable, so some craftsmen go for a trick: they drill a hole in the toner hopper, fill in the powder, seal the hole with tape, then pour the toner from the waste hopper in the same way – and you’re done, the cartridge is back in service. It would seem, what could go wrong?

The main thing here, of course, is the toner: the original is not sold by weight. Never and never. You can buy a bag of toner only from brands that are not related to the production of the equipment itself. We have already talked about what a complex substance this toner is: it is difficult to select the characteristics of the material so that the print quality is at a level and at the same time the powder does not spoil the cartridge. Large manufacturers of printing equipment closely monitor the technology of synthesizing particles of the substance, while shadow refuelers still use conventional “ground” toner.

But even if the salon in which the powder was poured in an artisanal way buys not the cheapest toners, the print quality of the refilled cartridge will quickly decrease. And it’s not about the toner anymore, but about the wear of the drum unit. A thin layer of photosensitive dielectric lies on the drum, which becomes thinner. In some places it loses the desired smoothness, toner adheres to it, and vice versa: toner particles adhere worse to the drum, documents come out of the printer faint. The drum unit cannot be repaired.

Commentary of the expert “PM”: “Tenderness” of the drum is the Achilles heel of laser printers. Among other things, many manufacturers add special additives to the toner to increase the life of the drum unit. Needless to say, there is nothing like this in non-original cartridges?

Craftsmen have learned to cope with this partly: the drum can be replaced with a new one. But now it’s time to grab the calculator. How much does it cost to refill a cartridge with the most expensive powder in the basement service center and change the drum unit? This is no longer the few hundred rubles that you can pay for a simple refueling. At the exit, you will get a patched-patched cartridge. The service life of this Frankenstein depends on such unpredictable parameters as the conscientiousness of the master and the quality of spare parts. It is much safer (and cheaper!) To simply buy a new original cartridge.

“When choosing a printer or MFP for the office, you should also pay attention to the warranty conditions for consumables provided by the manufacturer,” notes Pavel Anokhin, CEO of HP Inc. in Russia. “Unlike many other printing device manufacturers, HP offers a lifetime full life warranty on all models of toner cartridges. This means that a cartridge that is out of order due to the manufacturer’s fault will be replaced with a new one if the resource has not yet been exhausted. “

We’ve found that manufacturing and assembling cartridges is best done by large manufacturers who can afford automation. It is rather difficult to say what exactly the use of a non-original cartridge will turn out to be for the consumer. Studies conducted by large analytical companies show that in about a third of cases, nothing terrible happens with cartridges from little-known manufacturers. Buying one cheap noname cartridge for your home printer can even save you some money if you’re lucky. But the more equipment you have and the more often you use it, the higher the chances of losing on the left consumables than saving. Statistics help to estimate the scale of the disaster. Here are some figures from Market Strategies International (2016).

Commentary by a PM expert: It is safe to say what the use of a non-original cartridge in a laser printer will turn into – increased dust formation. Inside the printing mechanism, excess toner can do a lot of trouble – for example, stain the fuser so that at best it will start to leave streaks on documents, and at worst it will just stand up. Toner spills onto gears, shafts, rollers, and controller boards. This either leads to increased wear or completely destroys the printer.

Quote from MSI report: “Printer service technicians claim that 32% of problems with non-genuine cartridges, such as leaks, are due to manufacturing defects immediately after the cartridge is installed in the printer.”  What this means in practice: Don’t buy a noname cartridge , even if you urgently need to print your diploma, you may not even wait for the first portion of documents.

Quote from MSI report: “Customers using non-genuine ink cartridges are three times more likely to have a printer service technician than customers using genuine ink cartridges.” What it means: The risk of breaking your printer doesn’t just exist – it’s very high. So much so that it should be taken into account, even if you are buying a home printer cartridge that you don’t use very often. If we are talking about purchases for the office, then the statistics there definitely work against non-original consumables: if you purchase non-original cartridges, you will have to call technical support three times more often.

Commentary of an expert “PM”: Moreover, home printers are created with a much lower margin of safety – after all, this is not an industrial technique. Therefore, toner quality tolerances are extremely tight. If the office printer calmly digests a few extra grams of powder scattered throughout the mechanism, then the desktop “baby” may simply break down on the very first day. And you can’t get many spare parts for it – only for junk. Inkjet desktop printers are often not repairable at all: all that the service can offer you for a reasonable price is to flush the head and ink supply system. Any restoration will easily turn out to be more expensive than buying a new device.

Quote from MSI report: “81% of technicians agree that non-genuine ink cartridges will shorten the life of HP LaserJet printers due to issues such as toner leaks, damage to the printer mechanism, toner adhesion to the fusing unit (resulting in or damage to the unit itself) and dust and dirt getting inside the printer ”. What it means: a non-original cartridge can not only spoil the document, but also kill the printer – then you have to buy a new one and you won’t be able to save at all.

Among the most common problems arising from “non-native” cartridges, there are also quite serious ones. In inkjet printers, this is primarily ink spill and printhead clogging. Leakage is a dangerous and unpredictable breakdown, like a stroke: the damage to the device depends on where the ink gets into. In the worst case, it floods the optical sensors and boards, and the printer stops “seeing” the cartridge and paper.

The most fragile parts of laser printers are the magnetic roller, dielectric layer on the photo roll, blades that clean off excess toner after transferring the image to the paper, and seals that prevent toner from spilling. Due to the use of non-original cartridges, these areas are most often broken. Perhaps the most annoying potential problem is spilling powder from the waste toner box. If the hopper is leaking, it can become clogged with dust, and then waste toner, which has nowhere to go, gets on other parts and documents, and sometimes spills out of the printer.

Commentary by an expert “PM”: And yet the main problem of a non-original consumable is unpredictability. Copiers (like almost any other) have a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) parameter. When using branded cartridges and other resource elements, it is easy to calculate how much maintenance will cost for the printer throughout its life. And this price tag will change only with an increase or decrease in print volume. If you get on the slippery slope of “saving on matches”, it becomes impossible to predict the cost of the printer’s life cycle: the resource is unknown, it is not clear when and what problems will arise, the print quality is unstable. There is another important point to think about when choosing a cartridge – the air in the room where the printer is located. To check equipment and consumables for air quality around a working device, large companies spend a lot of effort and money – moreover, most often they have to comply with not one, but several standards. Among the most stringent are the German and Scandinavian indoor air quality requirements, the EU restrictions on harmful substances in the air in the workplace and the German Blue Angel environmental standard. Original cartridges are tested for compliance with such standards, which is not the case for consumables made by small and shadow manufacturers.

So, we found out that buying a non-original cartridge is more expensive for yourself. But buying the right consumable is sometimes not so easy: in addition to well-known brands that produce compatible cartridges of different quality, the market is full of fakes. These can be left-hand cartridges in their “native” packaging and even real branded cartridges disassembled and refilled in artisanal conditions. Most often, fraudsters counterfeit the original packaging on their own (up to 90% of all counterfeit packaging of such artisanal fakes on the market), but there is also a small chance of running into a fake cartridge in the original packaging – they are collected from large corporate customers, carefully opened, and then sealed again …

Counterfeiters are not just small garage production scammers. It is also a full-fledged global black market worth about $ 3.5 billion. They are also fighting counterfeiting seriously: major manufacturers of photocopying equipment, having united in the Imaging Supplies Coalition, support a network of agents around the world – they cooperate with the police and look for counterfeit manufacturers, and when they find them, they conduct raids and confiscate counterfeits. These guys have their own checklist, by which they identify fakes. The user does not need to master all the tools of the ISC special agent. To protect yourself from counterfeiting, you just need to be confident in the supplier: it is best to buy from authorized dealers in your region. But just in case, here are a few more signs by which you can recognize counterfeit.

Holograms and other methods of protection. On the packaging of branded consumables, as a rule, there are security measures like those that protect banknotes from counterfeiting – watermarks, holograms, microperforation. You can find out how the correct hologram looks like on the website of the manufacturer of the printer or MFP.

QR codes and serial numbers. Manufacturers label each batch, so that by scanning the QR code, you can check a specific product on the manufacturer’s website.

Engravings and stickers on the case. This is especially true of cartridges for laser printers (which, by the way, are more often counterfeited – they make up 85% of the black market for cartridges). There are many stampings and stickers with the manufacturer’s logo on the body of the original consumable; counterfeiters do not always repeat them exactly.