If I understood right, you mean that you have to use an original cartridge
and not a "compatible" one? In this case, I guess there is no problem
refilling the original cartridge.
No, let me elaborate.
In my business class Lexmark (C772N) laser, each toner
cartridge has a microchip, seemingly an EPROM, that holds a
unique serial # for the cartridge and an entirely
unnecessary toner loading program code. The toner loading
is something that should have stayed in the printer firmware
but was deliberately moved to the toner cartridge to try to
build up their rights to exclude competition.
The printer actively monitors # of pages and % printed per
each cartridge as well as a "best guess" about remaining
toner capacity down to a certain % (IIRC, it is 20%) then it
uses optical sensing through a clear portion of the toner
hopper to determine lower toner levels.
It will not allow refilling the original cartridge because
it remembers that cartridge serial #. When it decides it is
impossible for that cartridge to have enough toner left to
print, you have to replace it.
The sad part is, this printer has a full mainboard in back,
a quite elaborate affair that can have separate memory and
hard drive added to it. It runs linux and thus, should have
the firmware available by GPL standards, but they choose not
to release the source code. They want to straddle both
sides of the fence, claiming proprietary rights but not
reveling what they took from linux to make it happen.
On the other hand, my ancient Lexmark B&W has no chipping of
the toner cart at all. It has no webserver, no nothing
except a basic print engine and an optical sensor to warn of
very low toner. It does have an LCD and programmable
settings but no kind of prevention of refilling the
cartridges, and I have done so many times over the years as
this was back when the drum was built of a size and quality
that it would last over 30K pages.
Warning - don't try to clean one with acetone. Sometimes I
use a toner transfer method to make circuit board etching
patterns, and use acetone to clean off the toner mask later.
Since I knew acetone does a great job of cleaning off toner
I once tried to clean off a drum that had worn away too far
- but I wasn't sure of that "yet" and figured I might as
well try to clean it thoroughly in case it was reusable...
no loss really, I had 3 spare cartridges with good drums but
I really do want this printer to last forever as it can take
just about any random copy machine toner, it's fuser gets
hotter than most do today.
Anyway, acetone strips the entire surface off the drum,
leaving only a bare metal (aluminum?) surface. Completely
destroyed it, but at least it wasn't really a loss since it
was a last ditch effort, it was headed for the trash anyway
and was more of an experimental attempt than anything.
BTW, I saw someone manage to destroy a lexmark inkjet by using refilled and
"compatible" cartridges. When he called me, I asked to see the cartridge he
used, and was shocked at how could someone trust such a cartridge.
Destroyed the printer itself? IMO, that is pretty rare,
usually the printouts just look like crap if it's inferior.
Inkjets do seem more picky though, generally with lasers I
find one main issue, that many newer laser fusers don't get
as hot and toner for older or larger corporate or industrial
machines may not melt much if at all. There's also the
issue of particle size but I tend to use a B&W laser for
text where that seldom matters. My ancient Lexmark only
does 300DPI (actually does 600DPI but I never need to use
that, it needs raw data for that which takes so much longer)
and it's still sharp as a tack at text @ 300DPI.
I didn't even mention the other *luxury* of those old
Lexmarks, that they took standard SIMMs. Lexmark wanted a
few hundred dollars for a small (was about 4-12MB, IIRC)
memory upgrade, but since the memory was standard I just
pulled a couple 16MB Simms out of an old motherboard
instead. Today that doesn't matter so much, I don't recall
how much the new Lexmark has but IIRC about 128 or 256MB,
and adding the hard drive it would have a few GB of virtual
memory.
