Years ago, at work, I decided to have non-original refilled toner cartridges used on our HP5000 high volume printers. For nearly two years, that has been the purchase policy, and overall we did have cases where the toner seals failed and toner did go all over the place in the printer itself. While this is a quite limited statistic, the refilled cartridges did prove significantly less reliable than original ones in our case.

On the other hand, all that it caused is a tech support call to have the printer cleaned internally, and it resumed its daily job without issues. So, the economics did work out nonetheless.

Now, take this for what it is.

For one, this happened on computer labs with 25+ machines each, on high volume printers. Not sure how well this relates to a home printer.

Different companies may work differently and possibly the one we used (for almost two years) was not that good. Others may sell u better quality refilled cartridges (unless you refill yourself).

Also, this implies nothing in terms of the average life of a cartridge drum versus the toner powder in it.

Finally, the economics is quite different. High volume printers are quite more expensive themselves.

So,it all boils down to: in my experience, refilled toner seals did fail occasionally.


At home, I am using a HP OfficeJet Pro 8600. I hated, and stayed away from, inkjets since the 90s, so this was quite a change. So far, so good. Photo printing quality is awful, other types of printing is good enough.