Brother Toner Cartridges: Reset Gear Versus Reset Chip

Brother Industrial Corporation (BIC) is perhaps the only printer manufacturer that does not implement the ‘razor and razor blades’ mentality in the design of printer peripherals. In fact, BIC encourages refills on its toner cartridges and even provides users with step-by-step remanufacturing guidelines to extend a cartridge unit's capacity to over 3 print cycles. Moreover, BIC retained the reset gears in the design of their cartridges - in lieu of the more sophisticated microchips. This would allow users of Brother cartridges to simply adjust the reset gears to its starting position each time a refill is performed, which by the way reactivates the toner cartridge.

If reset chips are designed to control the printing process based on the number of printed pages, how does BIC implement this with the reset gear?

While cartridge yield is determined from the number of pages printed under a particular page coverage; calculation is based on the actual revolutions per minute (RPM) of the developer roller. For the Brother high yield black cartridge series, the maximum life of the developer roller is 110,000 revolutions or equivalent to 6,000 pages - at 18.5 revolutions necessary to complete the printing of a single page. Users can actually convert a high yield cartridge such as the TN-115 to a low yield TN 110 toner cartridge or vice versa, since only the reset gear controls the lifecycle of the Brother toner cartridge.

BIC’s laboratory tests confirm that the Brother HL 4040cn laser printer can detect if a new cartridge has been loaded; where the bias voltage is automatically set to high because of the tendency of new toner to print light. But as the cartridge is used regularly, density also increases. And to sustain this level all throughout the life of the cartridge, the density bias voltage is reduced accordingly. While users of non-Brother cartridges complain of how reset chips would desist printing while the cartridge still has sufficient toner supply, BIC can however assure its users that Brother reset gears will only respond when toner supply is really low or totally depleted.

Brother compatible reset gears (a.ka. flag gears) intended for starter cartridges are also available with Laser Tek Services. The flag gear resets the printer and eliminates the "Toner End Life" prompt so that a new cartridge cycle can commence.