Being nickel and dimed as a small business owner is no fun. For us, one of the most annoying problems is when our printer gives us the toner warning that it is running low. Wanting to get the most out of our toner investment from our Dell printer, we generally print until the printer locks us out and forces us to replace the toner cartridge. But, is the cartridge really empty? The answer is probably not, and more than likely you have a lot of toner mileage left. We spend about $70 per cartridge and have four installed on our printer. Guess what. We found a great work around to trick your printer into allowing you to use as much of the remaining toner as you want.

It turns out that printer cartridges have an installed chip which communicates with the printer. Whatever metric they use, the cartridge and the printer work together as a toner management system to make sure you always have toner on hand (and to increase their sales no doubt). So when the cartridge chip determines that it is running low on toner, it will signal the printer to warn you, and eventually to tell the printer that the cartridge is empty.

Not being one to believe a company that manufactures both the printer and toner, and is basically in the business of selling you more toner, we decided to do some testing. And our tests worked!

Here is what we found. If you go into the printer settings, you will find a command, an on/off switch, for the type of toner you are using. In our case, we have a dell printer and we were able to go into the admin settings and find the setting and basically turned on the ‘non-dell toner’ switch. What this did was to effectively turn off the chip on the cartridge and tell the printer to just print without worrying about how much toner was in the cartridge. Done deal. We were able to get an extra 100 pages of printing done with a cartridge that was telling us it was empty. That is about 15% more printing at $70, or over $10 in value, per cartridge.

The down side to this is that you no longer get the toner is low warnings and have to watch the quality of the printed pages to determine when you really need to replace the toner. But in our opinion it is well worth it.

While this worked for us on our Dell printer, you will have to see if it works for you on the type of printer you have. Let us know if this workaround works on your printer and we will post up the settings for your brand and model.