[SOLVED] What's the deal with toner chips?

[horstp]

So... it is my understanding that nowadays laser printer toners are equipped with chips that monitor the remaining toner solely based on the number of pages printed vs. how many pages worth of toner should be in the cartridge. When the page count is reached they communicate to the printer that there is no toner left and the printer refuses to work. This leads to the issue that, in case there is toner left in the cartridge or in case one was to refill the toner manually, it would be no good, because the printer would continue to refuse to work.

As far as I can tell, this arrangement is purely detrimental to the actual user, me in this case, because I really don't care for the printer to decide how much of my toner I get to use. Is it possible to force the printer to simply ignore what the chip says? I mean, this is all really primitive information, I reckon this should be fairly easy to accomplish?

In case what I am asking about is illegal, please do tell me and don't just delete the thread.

 

[RealBeast]

What you want to do is NOT illegal. Printers that use cartridges that have a chip sometimes have a preference setting in their LCD display functions where you can turn off its storage of use information, thus eliminating the page count.

 

[USAFRet]

My Brother MFC-L3770CDW

It is currently showing zero toner in the Cyan cart:

It just printed this:

I suspect it will print until it is actually empty. Then, being empty would be apparent in the actual print.
I have a new Cyan ready to go...just waiting until it actually fails to see what will happen.

 

[horstp]

I just bought an HP Laser 107w (wireless). I'm really happy with it, very clean print, really compact and the wireless functionality makes it manageable to share it with 5 computers. But the toner is going and I've noticed that replacement toners without chip are significantly cheaper than with chip. Like, 60% of the price or so.

It started telling me the toner was low a few weeks ago, kept printing normally. About a week ago some of the text I printed was a bit faded, yesterday I shook the cartridge, now it prints on full quality again, but obviously at some point it will stop working.