Toner 2-pack for Brother laser printers: $8

[frauenfelder]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/28/toner-2-pack-for-brother-laser.html

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[johnfoster]

remade toner cartridges either work perfectly or they do not. there is not much to lose when the cost to try it out is a coffee and a donut. that said, having smudges, streaks, inconsistent coverage on paper and other issues that eat my time is not worth saving $40.

[Glaurung]

@frauenfelder

Unless you must have color print outs, laser printers are faster and less likely to have problems.

Protip: colour laser printers are a thing. Unless you need to be able to print glossy colour photos, there is no reason whatsoever to own an inkjet.

ETA: I agree with @johnfoster, the low cost per page of official toner cartridges makes buying the cheap knockoffs a foolish bit of penny pinching.

[Professor59]

Would have been nice if it worked.

[d_r]

I bought a pair of these Linkyos another time @frauenfelder recommended them. One worked well, the other was smudgy. Usually I simply buy Brother-branded cartridges on eBay (where they are often cheap), they seem relatively expensive but the cost per page is still quite low.

The frequency with which Mark seems to be checking the Amazon prices on these suggests he does a lot more printing than I do, which surprises me since I use my home printer professionally for things like printing multipage exams for classes with 400 students. Mark, are you still publishing a paper version of BoingBoing?

[WasitabatisaW]

I’ve had pretty good luck filling the OEM ones with toner.

[ycleptShawn]

Still haven’t tried anything but the OEM cartridges. Not sure it is worth the bother.

[RickMycroft]

Keep this handy, just in case:
https://blog.meritline.com/2014/09/05/using-your-brother-toner-printer-how-to-reset-the-toner-life-end-message/

[Seurat]

My two year-old loves these.

[Daaksyde]

@frauenfelder

Unless you must have color print outs, laser printers are faster and less likely to have problems.

Same if you do want color. Some halftoning might be a bit more noticeable than with an inkjet, or the colors might be a bit flatter, so you might not want to use it for art prints that you’re selling, but for normal purposes a color laser printer does fine.

I have noticed that mine sometimes glitches the print if it’s an all-cyan or all-magenta vector image, but saving the image in a raster format and then printing works fine, as does plain black lineart. (For those curious, I sometimes use cyan or magenta lineart as an underlay for inking drawings. It’s convenient because with a good light table you can clearly see the vector underlay but also clearly see where you have and haven’t inked. If you’re using black ink, it’s harder to tell with a black underlay what you have and haven’t covered.)