Is there any manufacturer of laser printers that still produces laser printers that uses optical mechanisms to accurately measure the amount of remained toner in the cartridge, and that don't have these smart chips that lies about the remained toner and declares the cartridge empty while it is actually full?

Color or black or white laser printer ?

Most "smart chips" aren't that smart and can be easily bypassed allowing you to refill the toner, the only major issue people have when they do this is they don't empty the toner waste compartment and it starts to leak and makes a mess on the printing, most aren't hard to empty but it does involve splitting the toner cartridge apart, normally a few screws or plastic clips, some are even glued, but if they also contain the drum make sure you do it in a dimly lit room, the drum is photosensitive and can be damaged if exposed to bright lighting or sunlight for extended periods and wear lint free clean gloves, getting those finger prints off the drum really sucks to do later and handle it carefully any dents, dings or scratches will pick up toner and print it on every page, every time, and most drums do several revolutions per page printed so it will be all over the paper...

What model are you looking at getting or can be gotten cheaply around you ?  Maybe we can tell you how to fix it ...

I asked this. My hostel HP D1360 inkjet printer, stopped working, jamming paper during feeding from the feed tray and the print head can't be moved, so they have to replace the printer. Laser printer is the perfect choice for my hostel, since they prints a lot of documents, and they don't so needs color, so a B&W laser printer would be good for them.
As far as I know: HP are crappiest printers in terms of planned obsolescence, with HP known to use expiration dates and to count the amount of the pages printer to declare the cartrige empty and refuse to print, while it is still have 60% of the toner remained, and they also refuses to work with a 3rd party cartridge. Samsung printers are designed to stop working after sometimes, displaying a message to replace the imaging drum, despite it is still usable. Brother uses a sensor that try to lie in measuring the amount of remained toner in the cartridge. Lexmark don't supports 3rd party cartridges. I don't know what about Epson, Canon, Xerox and OKI, in the field of laser printers.

Ok most Samsungs you can reflash the firmware so they don't care what you do, toner, fuser, drum, you actually have to tape over the smart chip contacts, and the cheaper ones you can actually print until they are empty, it just warns you and beeps every now and then...

HP, well the newer stuff is mostly junk but the older stuff like a 4L is built like a tank and weight about 100lb I've seen them do a million pages before needing new rollers and you can simply pour in the toner when the pages get light and they cheap like $5 USD for 10,000 pages, but they only do like 4 Pages/min but if you need a 1000 page manual you do it before going to bed and it will be done when you wake up..

The brothers they lie, the cheaper ones use a mechanical flag and gears to say it's empty, they do sell different gears so they lie to the printer, but for the most part they will just keep printing until it's actually empty, you just get prompted every time you print, I just print to default windows printer not using brothers software to avoid this and you can reset the other stuff to new in the menu, but it sucks if your using the network to print but straight USB or real old school LPT it's not an issue, and you can reset the other stuff like drums in the menu..

Lexmark, well the commercial ones I refill them all the time, they don't seem to care, and will print until they are empty and most get junked because they start having feed problems, but most of the rollers you can slide them off turn them inside out and stuff them back on and get another half a million pages through it, or hit them with real fine sand paper to remove the glazing, they are well worth saving if you find them for free, and some times you need to replace the fuser wiper, and clean the corona wire, but you need to do this to most printers,and if they are free look for the additional paper holders, they normally throw them out with the printer and you might score a 5000 page feeder or three of them so you don't need a table to stick it on...

And if your really stuck you can get replacement smart chips for just about any toner cartridge online for a few bucks a piece, or at the same place you buy the toner from and they will look like a new cartridge to the printer...

My experience with BW laser printers:
- You may do about ~1..2 refills for the same (non-reffillable) toner cartridge. After that the cartridge stops working  properly (the quality drops, it may indicate "empty toner" or so)
- The problem is not any chip or so (I haven't seen any at all so far in laser printers), but the problem is, the toner cartridge contains a kind of pocket for "waste toner" (it collects the residuals of the toner that does not jump from the selenium drum to the paper, filth from the paper,...). And this pocket becomes full and starts to spill over. This is then detected by the circuit (it causes leakages on the HV drum excitation and that is sensed by the circuitry) and often reported as "Empty toner" warning. And of course, this situation degrades the print quality really considerably.

Theoretically it is possible to renew the cartridge by emptying and cleaning this pocket before the actual refill, but it is extremely messy job and because of the very high danger related to static electricity combined with high flammability of the dust not really safe to do without proper equipment (metal, highly antistatic desk, with proper vacuum and air filtration).
But on many places you may found shops offering "renewal" of the print cartridges - they do exactly what described, but they usually have that jig to make that job safe. Plus thez are able to replace the drum, if really worn out.
Very frequently they claim to "replace the drum and that is, why it is so expensive", but in reality the drum itself cost about $1 to $2 (so nearly nothing). The money they ask for is mainly to pay the messy cleaning job...

With newer printers the waste pocket problem becomes more severe - it really becomes very close to be the cartridge life limit.


The more expensive high volume printers have separate cartridges for the waste (otherwise the principles are the same), but there we are talking about machines sold for $2000 and above...

At work they replaced the old Lexmark printer with a Ricoh about a year ago.  The toner cartridges for it seem to be simple plastic jug with no contacts that I could see. 

Color or black or white laser printer ?

Most "smart chips" aren't that smart and can be easily bypassed allowing you to refill the toner.

The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly it invalidates the warranty and (b) I have never come across a refilled toner cartridge that works properly.

I used to have a HP 2605dn printer and decided to get refilled cartridges. They leaked toner all over the place and effectively ruined the printer. I would never use refilled cartridges again; ok so new ones are expensive, but a new printer is even more so (well usually..)


Ria

If the toner leaked, they either didn't seal the refill hole they melted in the toner cartridge with tape and they used the plastic plug that came in the kit, or they more then likely didn't empty the toner waste compartment, which takes time and a vacuum, and if the printing was not clean I'd be leaning towards the waste compartment was full.. And an awesome source of cheap laser printers is government surplus I've seen color lasers going for give away prices and not little home use printers but monsters that do like 100 pages a minute and have three paper trays holding 5000 pages each and stand about four feet tall from the floor, and I don't know about the UK but around here they seem to replace printers every two years or so and some have very low page counts.

While it's a pain I wouldn't let a bit of toner in the printer to cause me to throw it away, just take it outside with some canned air and a dust mask and give it a good cleaning, and keep the image drum out of the sunlight, and replace the fuser wiper blade and vacuum or brush the high tension wires..   

While it's a pain I wouldn't let a bit of toner in the printer to cause me to throw it away, just take it outside with some canned air and a dust mask and give it a good cleaning, and keep the image drum out of the sunlight, and replace the fuser wiper blade and vacuum or brush the high tension wires..   

All of which is a pain in the proverbial rear end and to my mind not worth the hassle just to save a relatively small amount of money.

I have no intention of risking ruining an extremely expensive business MFD for the small economy of refills.

No, I don't have an unlimited budget, but I do have a need for reliable and quality printing.


Ria

I hear you, if you have a new printer and need quality print jobs for customers, but if someone needs a good print job with a cheap / used laser printer refills are a good option and if they are done correctly they are just as good as factory new print at a fraction of the cost..

I think the school modified the printers because sometimes they mess up and squirt ink everywhere...

On the pages I mean... It's not like ground zero in the printer room... That's just wishful thinking on my part

Theres an older Black only HP printer on my home network, model 1012n.

I just refilled its cartridge recently using toner from another cartridge from a printer I scrapped and it works fine again. I had to break off some plastic but underneath that, there was actually a cap that you remove to fill it up. I didn't empty the waste, being new to toner mechanisms I wasn't aware there was a waste section, but no matter, its only temporary till a new cartridge is purchased.

I used to refill inkjets I used to have with either food colouring or ink I removed from trash picked printers and thats always worked for me but if left to long they do dry up but didn't matter since the printers were free. Now I rock an old HP laserjet colour printer I got for 40 bucks in 2014 that came with new toner

Theres an older Black only HP printer on my home network, model 1012n.

I just refilled its cartridge recently using toner from another cartridge from a printer I scrapped and it works fine again. I had to break off some plastic but underneath that, there was actually a cap that you remove to fill it up. I didn't empty the waste, being new to toner mechanisms I wasn't aware there was a waste section, but no matter, its only temporary till a new cartridge is purchased.

All this talk of refilling toner cartridges put me in mind of an incident at a large office I used to work in many years ago. We had several big Xerox photocopiers that used loose toner, in other words you didn't have replaceable cartridges as you do now.

Anyway, this machine needed more toner, and the task was undertaken by a girl who had never done it before. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but there was an almighty scream which was apparently heard over all three wings of the building on that floor..! Somehow, the toner powder had gone EVERYWHERE, including all over this poor girl, who was discovered standing completely still, obviously in total shock..! When she moved, the carpet could be seen under where her feet had been, in a clear outline of where she'd been standing..!

I didn't actually witness this incident personally, but it was the talk of the whole building for ages afterwards, and it took ages to clean it all off the carpet 

Toner can be very messy. I once changed a cartridge in a photocopier at the university library where I worked. It had a small door that opened when the cartridge was rotated to lock in place. The old cartridge's door broke off when I took it out, and I didn't notice. The new cartridge wouldn't seat in properly, and the rotation opened the door but did not shut it when removed. It made a fine dusting on the machine, on the carpet, the table, the head librarian and myself. We fixed it and cleaned up with a DustBuster vacuum.

I've also refilled photocopiers that have no cartridge. They had a long tube, about six inches diameter and three feet length. It fitted in a door beside the control panel and when rotated, opened up. You had to wiggle it for about 2-3 minutes until it emptied itself in the reservoir. I've never had bad experiences with those, though.

Machines that have a separate waste toner cartridge will stop working until you change it when it is full.

Sometimes photocopiers work so badly it makes you wish you still had an old Gestetner spirit duplicator in a closet somewhere...

Sometimes photocopiers work so badly it makes you wish you still had an old Gestetner spirit duplicator in a closet somewhere...

Many years ago, while moving offices at the school where my mom used to work, they found some sort of old duplication device.  The closest I could tell is that it was similar to a thermofax, but what I've read of thermofax machines seem more complex than this thing.  It looked like an extra thick version of a flatbed scanner.  In the base, under the glass was a pair of incandescent light bulbs with a reflector below them.  The master document went on the glass, than a carbon-like sheet went on top of the original, than a blank sheet of paper went above it.  The lid was closed and the lights were turned on.  I think there was a timer for the lights that would vary the contrast.  If not run long enough, the copy came out too light and if run too long the copy came out too dark.  It also only worked with single sided originals.  I think it finally went away when the stock of copy sheets was depleted.