Your guide to buying remanufactured cartridges…
Updated 17/07/2017
Where should you go to buy remanufactured ink or toner cartridges?
You may have seen and heard many printer suppliers offer their ‘own brand’ ink and toner cartridges as an alternative to the original manufacturer’s product. Maybe you’ve even considered buying remanufactured cartridges yourself?
The big question is, are they actually any good and are they worth the risk? Do they produce the same level of quality as cartridges built by the original manufacturer? We’re going to answer all your questions and more.
Here’s what you’ll learn on this page:
- What does Original, OEM, remanufactured, own brand and compatible mean?
- Should you take the risk and buy a compatible ink or toner cartridge?
- In truth, how reliable are compatible / remanufactured inks or toners?
- Will using a remanufactured cartridge void my printer warranty?
- Where can I buy wholesale compatible toner chips?
Terminology
Before we begin, it’s useful to define some of the terminology that’ll be used in this post:
- Original/Original Manufacturers’ Product/OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer)– this is a cartridge that is produced by the same manufacturer as your printer. So if your printer is a HP machine, this cartridge will be made by HP.
- Remanufactured/Own Brand/Compatible– these are remanufactured from previously used original ink and toner cartridges. The empty cartridges are sent back to a remanufacturing plant, where the cartridge housing is refurbished. Most of the internal components are replaced and the cartridge is refilled with new ink toner. They’re often sold under the retailers own brand label. They may also be referred to as compatible i.e. they’re compatible with your HP/Brother/Canon etc. printer. Lastly, compatible can be used to describe a third party toner cartridge where the whole product is brand new including toner / ink housing but was not made by the original printer manufacturer.
Remanufactured Ink
Remanufactured ink cartridges tend to be a lot cheaper than the OEM inks, however when an empty cartridge is recycled and remanufactured, most of the cartridge is reused, including any chips so depending on the age or how many times it has already been remade will greatly affect whether it will work or not when you come to use it. A reputable supplier will heavily test the chips to make sure there are no issues.
Remanufactured Toner
Remanufactured toner cartridges are a much more complex product and so you should always buy them from a trusted supplier. Some companies ship these products in from abroad with inferior replacement springs and gears which can cause them to fail quite easily. Alternatively a more reputable company will manufacture their compatible toners in the UK and replace any springs and damaged components with brand new parts, then fully test the new remanufactured toner. Always ask about the failure rate if you are unsure.
Crazy claims!
Some retailers may be so giddy about trying to promote their own brand cartridges to you that they make bold claims that are just completely unfounded so be careful!
Be on the look out for statements like this: “Our remanufactured toner cartridges exceed the OEM product.” Frankly, this is rubbish!
How can a remanufactured product exceed the quality of an original equivalent? Common sense dictates that the best cartridge you can buy will always be manufactured by the original printer manufacturer. Compatibles / remanufactured cartridges will always be an alternative low cost choice. Whilst most of the components are replaced during the recycling process, it’s still a recycled product and so it can’t be better than the OEM due to natural wear and tear!
Some models of remanufactured cartridges may hold more toner than the OEM and therefore print more pages, but this shouldn’t be a reason in itself to claim that it “exceeds the original”. In every other aspect of quality and performance, you cannot claim that the remanufactured item is better than the original.
So does this mean that remanufactured cartridges are not a viable alternative to the original product? Not at all!
Should you take the risk?
You might feel that buying remanufactured ink or toner is a big risk and that really depends on the quality of the cartridge that you purchase and what your printing requirements might be. It’s always best to think this through before you go ahead and take a gamble…
Let’s look at your printing requirements…
If you are considering buying a compatible ink or toner then think about what you will be printing and what result you would like. Below you’ll find some examples of printer usage. Have a look and see which one applies to you the most and whether a remanufactured/compatible cartridge will be up to the job.
Do you print in mono (black only)?
If you only print in mono, own brand ink and toner is very much a match for the original. Mono printing is less demanding, especially if you are only printing text on the page ad if what you’re printing out doesn’t need to be flawless then a compatible is a good choice.
Is your printer only used for internal communications?
If this is the case, then an own brand ink and toner would be perfect and a more cost effective option.
Do you print letters or documents for external communication purposes?
If you do, and these have blocks of colour such as a letterhead, or they contain some colour images, using a good quality own brand cartridge will give you good results providing that you purchase one from a reputable supplier with an acceptable guarantee of quality. Here’s where my Shameless plug comes in. We sell high quality compatibles with a full 3 year guarantee and a failure rate of less than 4%.
Good quality compatibles will be great for documents like this
What if you print full colour documents, including flyers or brochures?
This is trickier. I certainly know of customers that print high quality documents using a remanufactured cartridge but I’d always recommend that you run a small trial before producing thousands of pages of output.
When it comes to the highest quality printing or where you are printing for commercial purposes, it’s a real challenge to match the consistency of colour output which you get from the original manufacturers’ product.
If you answered yes to most of these a lot of the time then you should have considered buying remanufactured cartridges a lot sooner!
In truth, how reliable are compatible / remanufactured printer cartridges?
Is the own brand product as reliable as the original manufacturer’s product?
The short answer is no. But it would be wrong not to qualify with some tangibles.
In my experience, the failure rate of original ink and toner cartridges is less than 0.5% (one cartridge in 200). The failure rate for a high quality remanufactured cartridge is likely to be 1% on black cartridges and 3% on colour cartridges (two cartridges in 200 and six cartridges in 200 respectively).
If you took the harsh view, you can see that the failure rate of a remanufactured colour cartridge is six times worse than the original. However, I’d suggest fairer analysis is that for every 200 colour cartridges you buy, you will get five more product failures when you choose remanufactured. Based on the average person’s’ usage, this is likely to be one failed cartridge every five years or so. When put this way, it doesn’t seem too high, does it? Odds are that you may never have any trouble with a remanufactured cartridge.
(Note: The failure rate of our own brand compatible cartridges here at TonerGiant is currently just 0.5%).
Will using remanufactured or compatible cartridges void my printer warranty?
This is definitely one of the biggest questions about compatible/remanufactured cartridges we get asked.
NO, they won’t invalidate your printer warranty! In fact, it is against the law for any manufacturer to claim this. As we covered in our post that discussed some of the myths surrounding compatible cartridges, The Competition Act of 1998 outlines clear guidelines around the monopoly of consumer goods. Laws are passed to protect you, the consumer, and to give you free choice. If printer manufacturers were allowed to make this claim, it would mean that free choice would be taken away.
To ensure that you’re purchasing a cartridge that won’t cause damage to your printer, buy them from a reputable supplier that sells them with guarantees and warranties. Some may go even further to give you peace of mind and offer to cover all the repair or replacement costs of your printer on the rare occasion something might go wrong!
Where can I buy Wholesale toner chips?
If you’re looking for wholesale toner cartridge chips for Samsung, HP, Oki, Lexmark or Xerox printers you may well be finding it very difficult. A search in Google will result in a lot of Chinese wholesale companies so I would advise looking around and checking on websites like AliExpress, or Alibaba. Wherever you look, be sure to check that the company is reputable or you may find yourself getting in trouble with patent laws. Our compatible toners are manufactured with and programmed together with the cartridge chips and so we don’t sell them individually.
The price
One thing for sure is that a remanufactured, own brand cartridge will be significantly cheaper than its original counterpart. How much you save really depends on the printer that you are buying cartridges for, but it’s not unreasonable to expect to save 30% or more. That’s good enough reason to have considered buying remanufactured cartridges a lot sooner.
A word of warning
Whilst there are many companies that offer high grade remanufactured cartridges, there will be a few that sell inferior products. The best thing you can do is to check the quality of the warranty offered for the own brand cartridges before you buy.
In summary…
Compatible/remanufactured/own brand ink and toner cartridges aren’t ‘better than’ their OEM counterparts. However, they do offer a high quality, cost effective alternative and, in most print applications, will do a great job for you.
The ever improving production techniques and better quality control at the leading remanufacturing plants is resulting in higher quality cartridges. And when they come with guarantees and warranties from reputable suppliers, you really have nothing to worry about! So have you considered buying remanufactured cartridges yet?
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in March 2011 and was updated in November 2016 for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Has this eased some of your concerns about own brand cartridges? What experiences have you had in the past with them? Let us know in the comment section below, or tweet us @TonerGiant.
About Stuart DeavallI have been working in the printing industry with TonerGiant for over 16 years, and I'm the resident technical printer expert, helping people fix their printer problems for over 14 years. I have taken part in many training courses with HP, Samsung, Brother, Canon and Xerox to further my knowledge, and I'm also the Digital Marketing Manager at TonerGiant.co.uk (degree qualified).
This has been a big question for us for ages now, OEM or own brand re-used. A rainbow pack is costing us almost £800 and we go through 3-4 a year. Eek! we tried a recycled one from a well known buying and selling internet site and it didnt work, Cartridges have a ‘kill switch’ micro chip that must be replaced before it can be re-used. This had not been done. Worst still was that our printer kept saying ‘incorrect lock lever position’ and refusing to work with the ‘recycled’ cartridges. We were also getting wonky read outs for how much toner was left. In short, a disaster and waste of money.
In one last go to save money we tried Tonergiants recycled ones as it was saving us £300 on an original rainbow pack. So far so good. Quality of output is bang on. Chips have been replaced and they seem to fit fine. If this trial works out successfully I think we have found our solution. I really don’t want to go back to paying £800 a set 3 times a year.
What hasn’t been addressed here though is the ‘rip off’ claims from all manufacturers, OEM and recycled, of how many sheets can be printed. 15,000 they claim. Yeah right. they can maybe print 15k if all you are printing is a full stop on each page but from my experience you are lucky to get 3000-5000 print outs from a cartridge. They simply run out too fast. Im my opinion ALL cartridges are insultingly too expensive and are a rip off. Surely the cost of toners new and recycled has to be investigated by Office of Fair Trading but until then Tonergiants option is the lesser of these evils! – mind you they are very quick to deliver and seem a decent bunch on the phone! for now anyway they will be getting our hard earned cash when it comes to buying toner cartridges.
Thanks for your comment:
I can understand your frustration with regards to cartridge capacity.
This is something that isn’t very well documented but all manufacturer cartridge capacities are based on a 5% sheet coverage. This was originally set by the international organisation for standardisation (ISO) and to give you an idea of what that means, 100% coverage would be an A4 sheet completely covered in ink, therefore one sheet at 5% as you can imagine is quite a small amount of text (approximately 3 paragraphs of text).
I used ‘compatable’ toner in my HP CM1015 MFP. The printer and the paper was covered in toner and I had to call the engineer in to sort the mess out. I only use the over-priced genuine HP since then.
Anyone who can design a laser printer with good cheap colour toner will do a lot of good business from people like myself. £200.00 plus is way over the top for a set of 4 HP colour toners. I will not buy the ‘compatable’ ones though.
Thanks for your comment.
Cartridges can be very expensive which is why we always do our best to keep our prices as low as possible, and whilst in our experience we have never sold a compatible toner that has caused a problem to this extent, we would hope that any reputable supplier would sort that out for you.
Did you contact the supplier when this happened?
Yes. I complained bitterly. The supplier reimbursed me fully for the cost of the ‘compatable’ toner packs, some had not been used and were sent back to the supplier. Of course I dont want to risk that again and so have to stick to the overpriced HP toner.
It would help if a discount cound be given for returned empty toner cartridges; why has’nt onyone thought of doing this? The cost of the actual cartridge must be a lot more than the actual powder that is inside……….prices for future orders could be reduced for returned cartriges.
When I bought a non-OEM toner cartridge I was not able to recycle it. This, in my book, is not compensated by the cheaper price.
Thanks for your comment
When recycling a toner cartridge there are 2 grades that the recycling company considers. Virgin toners – these are brand new empty cartridges and non-virgin – which are cartridges that have already been re-used at least once. Non -virgin toner can still be recycled, but as you can imagine there are only so many times a cartridge can have components replaced before it deteriorates to much to recycle.
We have used re-manufactured toner cartridges a number times.The only problem we have encountered is toner leaking out into the printer and causing streaks (in this case magenta) on the printed page.
Because it didn’t happen immediately and we had the cartridge in the printer for a while, we did not feel justified in complaining. Mostly there have been no problems. It is reassuring to know that these products are fully guaranteed.
Overall, we feel the saving in costs certainly makes it generally worthwhile to use these for medium quality proofing/printing.
Thanks for your comment.
It’s important to us that our customers are happy with every purchase, so any feedback from our customers really helps us to review the quality of our cartridges and make sure they meet our high standards. We give a 2 year guarantee with our cartridges that covers any faults at all, plus if the print quality doesn’t meet your expectations, we will be more than happy to take them back.
If you purchased your remanufactured cartridges from another supplier, it’s still a good idea to report any faults, that way they can at least check to see if there is a problem with a batch that they have.
Hmmn, I’m not entirely clear or convinced about this article….
My understanding is that there are actually three types of cartridge availabe – OEM, Compatible AND remanufactured. Your article seems to suggest that remanufactured and compatible are one and the same which I do not believe to be true.
My understanding is that compatible cartridges as manufactured by companies such as Lexmark and others are not remanufactured HP products but brand new items (possibly made under licence from HP).
OEM is usually the most expensive with compatibles 20 – 30% cheaper and ‘remanufactured’ anywhere up to 60% cheaper.
I have to say I have had no problems with cartridges from Toner Giant – be they compatible or remanufactured, however I have had serious problems with remanufactured cartridges from other companies.
*****.co.uk (name ommitted for legal reasons) supplied me with a full set for an HP2420 – toner was spewing out everywhere when I opened the wrappers and printing was awful with banding of unprinted areas on all 3 colours. The holes that had been made to refill the cartridges were simply covered with gaffer tape – not even a rubber bung used. I suspect that no remanufacturing of these units had taken place beyond simply refilling!
Refilling cartridges is something that can be done by the end user with Toner and chip replacements easily and cheaply available from several online suppliers – I have had good success with this but only when using known first generation genuine cartridges, and it seems that after 2 or 3 refills the quality fades – I suspect due to a reduction of electrostatic charge on the roller. The suppliers of toner also recommend only refilling genuine HP cartridges and not compatible or remanufactured units.
Hi Chris, thanks for your comment.
You are correct there is a difference between compatibles and remanufactured cartridges and each name can be used in different ways. On our web site we use the description of compatible to describe our own branded cartridges because we mean they are ‘compatible’ with the printer they are listed against, however they are technically remanufactured products as the main ‘shell’ is a recycled part of the OEM toner and some of the components and mechanisms are replaced with new parts.
Stuart. Would you refund the cost of a ‘compatable’ toner if it had been used and was unsatisfactory – leakage, streaking etc etc?
Hi Rod, Yes when we sell our compatible cartridges we want our customers to be totally happy and if the print quality doesn’t meet your expectations we would be happy to take them back under our 2 year guarantee.
With regard to your response as to remanufactured or compatible toner not voiding your warranty since the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Improvement Act was passed in 1975. This only applies to U.S law and is completely irrelivent for the UK market.
With the amount of savings for general customer buying re-manufactured cartridges, its better to go with this option. From customers I have read about the common issue with these kind of cartridges is chip plate which comes in contact with the printer.
Though original cartridges have brand value but the amount of savings one gets from re-manufactured is essentially great than the ones mentioned earlier. I would like to mention about a thing other user commented above is that if the tone have all the parts working properly then there is need just to refill them.
Does the answer to “Will using remanufactured or compatible cartridges void my printer warranty?” still hold and does it apply to extended care packages. HP are claiming at least for care packages you HAVE to use HP originals.
Hi Jane, that is a very good question! The warranty that you get when you first purchase the printer (standard warranty) cannot legally be invalidated by the use of compatible cartridges and Manufacturers are not allowed to say this, however extended warranty purchased separately for the printer are different and manufacturers can then get away with saying the use of compatibles can invalidate a warranty. However, if you ever experience that and your printer breaks down while using compatibles, a good compatible supplier with provide a printer technician to come and look at the printer and tell you whether it was the compatibles or not, and if it wasn’t the manufacturer should honor the warranty (it’s always best not to tell them you use compatibles anyway if you have a warranty). If it was the compatibles that caused a fault, a good supplier with fix or replace your printer for free. This is what we do but in my 10 year experience at the company, this has happened only once. Stu.
Hi,
Konica Minolta 2530DL toner
I want toners for this machine.
How definite are you that your toners work – well – on this model?
I don’t want to go through the garbage of returning things.
Of course, I will need all four colours.
Hi there,
overall we have a very low failure rate but to be honest with you there is always a chance of failure as is the nature of a remanufactured toner. I’ll ask one of the team if they have experience with this range in particular to give you a better idea and they will contact you directly.
Stu
Hi
Are the chips reset in re-manufactured HP toner cartridges?
Many thanks
Hi John, normally the original HP chips are re-used and they are reset.