Well to be honest this is quite a tricky question.  Although most toner cartridges can be refilled and reused several times, they obviously won’t go on forever.  Eventually the parts will begin to fail, but before you get carried away imagining printer damage the truth is when it’s time to replace the cartridge you’ll see on the printed page.

When a new Toner Cartridge is Required

Your printouts will tell you when a toner cartridge should be recycled and not refilled.  You will begin to see dots, spots or blank areas on your pages these will normally be repeated several times on the page, your cartridge is beginning to fail.  A razor sharp pencil line on the page is also an indication that a cartridge has reached the end of it’s life.

When you start seeing such signs and the print quality falling it’s time to get a new cartridge and start again.  remember to recover as much toner as possible from the cartridge first.   You could believe that it’s a bit of a bind having to keep your eye on the print quality, but in reality most people already do this anyway.    Don’t make a big deal about this, just watch the pages for quality and when they start to get worse get a new cartridge with luck you’ve probably refilled  few times and probably saved hundreds of dollars already !!

Don’t be tempted to overdo using the cartridge, the quality should be identical in a refill, so when it isn’t just get a new cartridge, it’s not worth waiting for the quality to get worse and worse, you’ve already saved loads of money and made an environmental difference.

Count those savings and buy yourself a brand new cartridge, you’ll already have the refill toner to get some serious value out of the new cartridges!