Should You Buy Third-Party Toner Cartridges for Your Laser Printer? Our Hands-On Test Report Provides the Answers
Sample of print designated as suitable for “Individual” use. Note the various image-quality defects, particularly those displayed in the red box.
Testing showed that an average of only 31 percent of prints produced by the non-HP branded toner cartridges were suitable for business use, and an average of 69 percent prints were not suitable for business use. The question is: is all of this unpredictability and inconvenience worth it, and with all of the poor reliability and inconvenience issues that Wirth Consulting observed in testing, are there indeed any quantifiable savings?
Example: When using several non-HP toner cartridges, we observed considerable stray yellow, magenta, and cyan toner particles and residual banding on drums . The Original HP 201X High Yield Toner Cartridges with JetIntelligence ran to near perfection.
Summary
If you intend to use replacement toner cartridges for business use, this test demonstrates that the unpredictable print quality and inconvenience exhibited by all tested non-HP replacement toner cartridges (banding on prints, toner deposited within the printer, unacceptable noise levels, clumsy packaging) will provide little or no peace of mind, and should cancel out any perceived advantages. The most reliable choice is to install HP 201X JetIntelligence toner cartridges and practice print-output management (for example, specify draft EconoMode/grayscale/black-only print modes for internal distribution and archival purposes). On the other hand, if all that is required is readable prints – but prints that are likely to be marked by embarrassing print defects – then replacement toner cartridges may do the job.
The full test report is available here and contains many additional details.
Additional Resources
- Report Download – Performance Test – HP JI 201X vs Replacement Print Cartridges
- Video – Third-Party HP 201X Toner-Cartridge Clone Complains Loudly
- Photo Gallery – HP OEM 201X JetIntelligence vs. Non-OEM Toner Cartridges
- Video – HP Color LaserJet Pro 252dw Uboxing and Setup
- March 2015 – HP Wants to Give You 33-Percent More Prints with New JetIntelligence Toner Cartridges
- HP – “Compatible” and “Alternative” Toner Cartridges are not HP Toner Cartridges
- HP – 201A, 201X Compatible Toner Cartridges are not HP 201A, 201X Toner Cartridges
- HP – 410A, 410X Compatible Toner Cartridges are not HP 410A, 410X Toner Cartridges
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