Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The kit itself is excellent. 4 bottles of toner, sealed and capped. 4 screw on nozzles. 4 microfiber cloths. Plastic gloves. The price is very competitive too. It's 2 reloads of each color for 150% the cost of one retail toner cartridge. Most importantly, it included a color instruction sheet with photos and instructions on how to refill the cartridge and how to reset the page counter. This was great.
Once the magenta and black needed resetting after every page, and wavers of toner thinning were showing up, I decided to test this refill kit out. As was stated before, the nozzle is a little small, but you can trim the opening easily and the cap still snaps on.
I found the easiest way to fill was to put the nozzle all the way into the fill hole, so the cap prevented dust from escaping. You have to squeeze slowly but firmly to squirt the toner in. It's a powder, but it flows like a fluid.
One problem with the Black bottle was a little bit of plastic flashing I didn't notice at first. Thhat caused a trickle of toner when squeezing the bottle. Easy enough to clean up, and not as bad when squeezing lightly. Just make sure you do your refills on a hard surface so it's easy to clean up.
I filled black high-yield cartridge until toner dust would puff out while squeezing. The instructions said to let it settle, then fill it 100%. I decided to hold back the last 25% of the bottle for a rainy day. For Magenta, I did the same thing and had no leaks. Magenta flows a little more easily.
I sealed everything up and checked for leaks by shaking side to side. The endcap was secure, no puffs, drizzles, etc anywhere. I installed the carts back into the printer. The bottles, I re-capped with the original caps and used the clean-up rag to wipe around the neck. Both were put into a ziplock, just to be safe. Total time was about 25 minutes, including cleaning up my spills and printing several test pages.
And that's where the real problem showed up. Before refilling, I had NO splotches or problems at all, other than a little bit of thinning in some solid prints. The black now leaves a smudgy, dithered pattern down across every sheet of paper, and the magenta leaves big, 2mm blobs all down the center of the paper.
I thought maybe I'd spilled, so I printed 10 sheets with one black and one magenta line across each. No change.
I open the printer, and found that the magenta is literally leaking out of the roller whenever it rolls. It leaves toner on the cyan cartridge and the drum under it.
I cleaned up as best as I could, blew off everything, blew out everything, and drained about 20% of the new toner out of the magenta cartridge, thinking perhaps I'd overfilled.
No change.
The implication here is that either the resin is finer particles than Brother uses, or the electrostatic properties of the resin are different than those of the Brother toner. Either way, it's a problem with both colors I used. I have no intention of using the blue or yellow.
Considering the problems I've had with remanufactured cartridges in HP printers, and this toner refill kit for this printer, it's obvious that there's something else at play which isn't being communicated.
NOT ALL TONER IS THE SAME!
If you get discount toner, you're not guaranteed to get the exact same type of powder that the manufacturer uses. You might get too fine or too coarse a particle. Maybe they're irregular vs spheres. Maybe the resin is the wrong type of plastic.
Whatever it is, there's no way to ensure that your discount toner provider has the means and the inclination to ensure that you receive exactly the right type of toner. There's enough mark-up that if you have a problem, they might just offer you a refund and an apology. But your printer still had toner vomited all over inside.
Now, you may get lucky, and have it work out. Or, you may not care about toner spills because the price is good. If that's the case, then this kit was very well put together. But you'll never know until after you've had a leak.
OEM brand toner, while overpriced by about double, is backed by the promise that it will be exactly the right product for your printer.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Toner Eagle Brand Compatible Brother HL-4040 4070 TN-110 TN-115 TN115 4 Color Toner Refill Kit
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