Does the Use of Compatible Brother Toner Cartridges Affect the Amount of Prints?

Many would have asked their retailers about this question. Does the use of compatible Brother toner cartridges affect the amount of prints? Well it’s not only for Brother, this has been a long argument with all other printer manufacturers. What we should blame is not the item, but rather the provider of these sub-standard supplies.

A compatible cartridge can perform of par with an original, given that it was manufactured to provide the same performance as its counterpart. Unlike those compatibles that are mainly produced just to gain profit and does not give any concern to what the customer would actually get. Regardless if it’s an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) toner or not, there are factors that may cause the number of printed pages to diminish or increase based on its standard capacity.

What are the factors that affect the amount of prints?

Type of Media

Printer users typically use the standard plain paper especially for printing documents with only plain text or with no graphics. It’s ideal and of course less expensive, but there are times that you need to change it with thicker or glossy sheets when needed. The thing is, there are some types of media that absorbs or requires more toner over plain papers. Hence, you get fewer prints out of the cartridge you used.

Type of Document

In most offices printing can be a regular task, but the amount of prints is not mainly dependent on how frequent you print. It is the type of document that can affect the number of results you can draw out of the cartridge. A document composing of only characters require less toners compared to one with combined text and images (whether mono or colored).

Toner Coverage

Do you know what for is that 5% coverage that is typically printed on the packaging of the print supplies you purchased? In general that 5% is approximately equivalent to only 1500 characters. The page-yield of a laser toner cartridge greatly depends on it.

Let’s use Brother TN315 toner cartridges to explain it further. Its black model can yield an approximate of 6000 pages at 5% coverage. If for example you will only use the printer for printing business letters, the chance to get 6000 or more printouts can be achieved. While on the other hand, if the printer will be used to print greeting cards with graphics and contains 3000 characters, it can possibly reduce that standard yield into half.