Color laser printers/toner cartridges/refills

[Signals]

Within the last couple of weeks I purchased my very first color laser printer. I am pretty excited because not only is this my first new laser printer, it's a color laser printer.

The color laser printer that I purchased is a Konica Minolta Magicolor 1600W. I bought this laser printer at Fry's Electronics and the purchase price with tax was $139.64. The Konica Minolta magicolor 1600W is the entry-level, or low end color laser printer with no bells or whistles, just your basic personal laser printer. Which is a very reasonable price for a color laser printer that prints at 1200x600. (not to bad)

Anyone that owns a color laser printer knows that the toner cartridge replacements can be pretty pricey, in fact Fry's Electronics want's $109 for a single replacement toner cartridge and my color printer requires four of them, cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK.) Which is $440 and tax just for toner cartridge replacements. Definitely not going pay that much for toner cartridge replacements on a printer that was only $139.64 to start with.

Konica Minolta's website claims that their regular toner cartridge replacements will give me 1500 sheets at 5% coverage, and Konica Minolta's high-yield toner cartridge replacements, they claim will yield 2500 sheets at 5% coverage.

I said all that but now I'm going to lead off and to a different discussion, and that is toner refill kits. I would like to get some feedback from you guys and gals who have purchased toner refills and manually refilled your toner cartridges. What is your experience? Easy? Difficult? Did the toner that you purchased appear to be on par in quality as that of the original from the manufacturer?

Something that I found interesting about about the toner that Konica Minolta claims is being used for the magicolor 1600 series is that they are stating that they are using a more advanced polymer toner called; Simitri Toner.

Simitri being a trademarked name for this low-temperature fusing polymer toner. I was wondering if this Simitri polymer laser printer toner that Konica Minolta claims to have created is really just a marketing gimmick to persuade people into purchasing their very high dollar toner cartridge refills, or if there is actually something significantly different to this polymer toner.

Since the laser printer was invented have there really been that many different types of toner that have been created and or used in the various kinds of laser printers? If I go ahead and use aftermarket toner refills that the seller says is compatible with my laser printer, do you see that I run very much of a risk of doing much damage to my laser printer?

On the flip side of this coin, if I use aftermarket toner refills that is not this quote special polymer blend that Konica Minolta says I need to use, I refill my toner cartridges twice I get over 6000 or 7000 copies, I end up ultimately spending under $400 for the toner refills and the cost of the printer originally, and in the end if it damages the printer, no big deal, I'll just buy a new one.

Do any of you guys have some preferred websites where you purchase laser toner refills and/or refill cartridges?

Just about the least expensive place I have found to purchase toner refill ink and cartridge reset chips has been Amazon.com. I can get Cyan, magenta, yellow and black together as a kit with reset chips for around 50 or 60 bucks, and they claim that all get 2500 copies from that refill.

So does anybody have some wisdom about how I should go about handling my laser printer refills?

 

[Thatkidbob]

There is a difference between typical pulverized toner and polymerized toners. Pulverized toner has a larger, and less uniform particle size, which degrades image quality. Also, as a result of its larger size, it takes more heat to fix pulverized toner to a page.

Polymerized toner has smaller, more uniform particles, which results in higher image quality and requires less heat (read as: less energy), to bake on. It's also more environmentally friendly because polymerization allows for waste toner to efficiently be reprocessed and put back to use. KM isn't the only brand to use polymerized toner, but they probably have some patents on the process (I'm not sure).

You can TRY to use pulverized toner in a KM system, but I wouldn't recommend it. I don't think it would hurt the machine, but I think the toner may not stick to the page because the temps inside the unit won't be hot enough to properly fix the toner to the page.