CrazedTechs Online - OEM vs. Third-Party Laser Toner Cartridges

Having gotten my start in the IT profession as a printer repair tech, I have seen the damaged and destroyed innards of many different brands of laser printers. The majority of the time, I would find a third-party toner cartridge installed in the printer and piles of toner on either side of the paper path where the paper passes under the toner cartridge. This leaked toner finds its way onto the various drive rollers, cogs, gears, and into cooling fans, building up over time and eventually causing component failure. This is not to say that OEM cartridges are not susceptible to leakage but, in my experience, I have found that the OEM cartridges rarely leak toner and, when they do, it is in small amounts. I have not, on the other hand, ever seen a third-party toner cartridge that didn't leak and most of them leak more toner from a single cartridge than you would see leaked from ten OEM cartridges.

That's why, when my office supply vendor asked me to put his company's brand of toner cartridge to the test in one of our printers, I hesitantly accepted, then decided to conduct as scientific a test of the non-OEM cartridge as possible, laying to rest, at least in my mind, the argument that third-party toner cartridges are just as good - if not better than - OEM toner cartridges. I have documented this test, combined its results with my past experiences and compiled the results in this article; I do hope you find it useful.

I entered into this test open to finding a third-party toner cartridge that would perform as well as an OEM cartridge and, to be as fair as I could, I wanted to give each toner cartridge a clean start in the same printer. This involved thoroughly cleaning the printer before using the third-party cartridge, using the third-party cartridge until it was depleted, thoroughly cleaning the printer again, then using an OEM cartridge until it was depleted - taking pictures at each step and printing a configuration page at each cleaning. The configuration page details the total number of pages printed from the date of manufacture as well as the number of pages printed since the last scheduled maintenance was performed. Obtaining page counts allowed me to calculate the page yield for each cartridge so that count could be compared to the published page yield for a given toner cartridge.

For this comparison, I selected our Hewlett Packard LaserJet 5Si/MX. It typically prints more than 1,000 pages per day and, considering the number of pages it prints, it requires very little attention other than routine maintenance (which doesn't really surprise me since it is an HP printer but I'll save that topic for a different article). This printer has printed 1,141,387 pages to date and it has printed 73,705 pages since its last scheduled maintenance was performed. The only cartridge types used in this printer have been either the HP3909A (standard capacity OEM cartridge with an expected page yield of 15,000) and the HP3909X (high capacity OEM cartridge with an expected page yield of 17,100).

Before cleaning the printer, I took a few pictures to show the amount of toner that had accumulated along the paper path, where the paper passes under the toner cartridge, since the printer's last scheduled maintenance was performed. There is some toner on either side of the paper path but not much considering that this is the accumulation from over 73,000 printed pages or about five OEM toner cartridges.