Did you know printers can order their toner?
September of 2023; my Brother MFC-L3770CDW printer (b3n.org) kept printing awful black and magenta streaks across all the pages. I wasted reams of paper trying to fix it to no avail. It was time to replace it. I was just going to get another one, but there was a supply shortage of Brother laserjets so I replaced it with a Canon ImageCLASS MF753Cdw (Amazon).
Auto-Replenishment
One of the options with Canon is to turn on Auto-replenishment–whenever the toner runs low it will auto-order more by itself. I don’t like to shop so this is a no-brainer.
I couldn’t find any documentation on the re-ordering logic, but I can tell you the timing on the Canon auto-replenishment isn’t intelligent. Despite printing off several reams a day the Printer waited until I had ~500 pages of black toner remaining before ordering more so I ended up running completely out and having to wait on FedEx to continue my print job. It’s too dumb to look at usage patterns. As far as I can tell a cron job runs at 6 am, if the printer sees that less than 500 estimated pages are left on any color toner, it will order more. This probably works for most people.
Canon charged $173 for a 7600-page monochrome cartridge which works out to 2.3 cents per page. That was a black cartridge. And that was last year.
Fast forward 12 months to 2024, I make some coffee ☕️, check my email, and see an order confirmation from Canon. Yikes!
I checked my printer settings, and each color cartridge had about 500 pages remaining. Initially, I thought these were priced too high and I could get them much cheaper off Amazon or Best Buy, but because of the discounts, the order from Canon came in at a lower price.
It looks like color prints cost 11.1 cents per page (I originally thought it was 3.7 cents per page, but it’s 3.7 cents per page per color). This is still a lot cheaper than having prints done at Staples. At our current rate of color printing (522 color pages per year), I’m hoping it will be a decade before the printer auto-orders more!
OEM vs 3rd Party Toner
While it’s more expensive, I’ve changed my strategy from using cheap 3rd party toner to expensive OEM toner. While on the Brother, I used highly rated quality 3rd party toner–but it seems to me the aftermarket toner manufacturers make a quality product, get a high user rating, and then switch to lower quality components once they have market share. Once their reputation is tarnished they start over with a new brand name. I noticed Amazon stopped selling the top aftermarket Canon toner cartridges between the time I started and finished writing this post. I’m pretty sure bad toner and excessive toner spill is what killed my Brother printer. It’s just not worth the hassle to save a few dollars. And of course, if you run into any problems support will just blame it on your toner.
My Thoughts on Auto-Replenishment Services
I have no problem if machines autonomously order things for me, it’s one less thing to do 🤖. I would love it if my Canon would order paper as well! It already counts each page printed so it has the information, I think auto-paper ordering is a huge miss by printer manufacturers.
I’d like it if all of my appliances replenished themselves! But I also think designers should consider these 5 laws of automated replenishment.
The 5 Laws of Auto-Replenishment
- It must be for the benefit of the customer. Don’t purposefully make products for the sake of selling consumables. A computer mouse does not naturally have consumables so shouldn’t need auto-replenishment to refill the laser juice or a monthly subscription based on the number of clicks. But for a laser printer, it makes sense that toner is a consumable. ✅
- The pricing must be the same or better than market rates. Don’t gouge the customer. If Amazon sells it for $200 you need to on average, match or beat it. I checked multiple stores including Amazon, Canon charged less than I could have bought genuine toner anywhere else. ✅
- The customer must have the opportunity to cancel the order before it ships. I did have the option to cancel the Canon order before it shipped. ✅
- The system must not over-order. It shouldn’t order blindly on an annual or monthly schedule creating needless stockpiles like Amazon subscribe and save. The Canon order was created based on the estimated toner remaining. ✅
- The system must not be tied to the Borg collective (b3n.org). If the internet is lost (looking at you HP!) or the company goes out of business the product must continue to function autonomously and be able to use 3rd party supplies. The Canon printer continues to function with or without auto-replenishment and with or without internet, and there is an option in settings to disable only allowing genuine toner (which was disabled by default on mine). ✅
When Auto-Refill services do and don’t make sense
While I will use Canon’s auto-replenishment service, HP Instant Ink is an example of a service I would not use. It would be good if it charged you something like 5 cents a page and you got a bill at the end of each month. But on HP you’re paying a monthly fee to print up to a certain number of pages a month (which you constantly have to manage if you under or over-print) then they gouge you on overages, and if your internet goes down the printer can’t check to see if you have a subscription so won’t print at all! HP Instant Ink is the perfect example of what not to do.
I much prefer Canon’s straightforward auto-replenishment model of no monthly fees. The printer just orders toner when it needs it.