I bought a couple Brother laser printers for here at work, a HL-2040 and one of their multifunction printer/copiers. They’re generally okay; they’re not great like the Xerox that would not stop running or the current HP LaserJet that replaced the Xerox but cannot replace its memory.

My two constant complaints with these printers is that 1) they curl pages, and 2) the printer thinks the toner cartridge is empty long before it actually is.

As it turns out, #1 is just a function of Brother printers being pretty much cheap crap. Not to say you don’t good bang for your buck, but you also get bad curl for your page. So much for that.

But #2 seems either malicious on Brother’s part, or incompetent on their engineer’s part. The sensor that detects low toner is placed above the empty level so there’s still toner left when the printer errors out and won’t let you print any more. Why it does this instead of simply printing until I can see that the toner is gone is beyond me; it’s disgustingly wasteful.

But though you can’t do anything about #1, you most certainly can deal with #2. This advice, though, comes without warranty. If you wreck your printer or something, don’t come complaining to me about this. For all I know, this is not safe.

If the printer is erroring out, saying that you are out of toner, place a bit of electrical tape over the sensors windows on each side of the toner cartridge. To do this you have to lift the cover, pull the drum out, remove the cartridge from the drum, and locate the windows. They should be small, round, semi-translucent windows on each side of the cartridge. Both will be located in exactly the same spot, as it seems the toner sensor is optical and basically shines a light right through to detect the toner level.

Place small bits of electrical tape or something else vaguely dark over the apertures, slide the cartridge back into the drum, slide the assembly back into the printer, close the top, and away you go. You will probably get at least 50% more life out of those cartridges.