Over the years, across the companies I founded both large and small, I’ve tested innumerable brands of cost-effective third-party toner cartridges and I wanted to share the brand that has become our go-to.
For the uninitiated, 3rd-party laser toner cartridges have always been the way to go because they are a fraction of the price of an OEM cartridge and they perform just as well – assuming you find a reliable brand. When you do find a great brand, they’re worth their weight in gold due to the cost savings, and assuming they stay in business, it’s simple to stick with them across all your printers and it just makes things easy.
My go-to these last 4+ years, has been Valuetoner – easily purchased at Amazon. I tend to use a lot of Canon products and the specific cartridges we use for our desktop printers has always been the 4-pack, usually available for less than $50. They also make toner for many other brands of laser printers but our experience is across primarily Canon, and Brother. We use another 3rd party manufacturer for our large commercial floor-standing office machines, but we can save that for another post.
Keep in mind, and be warned…
…not all 3rd party laser toner is made the same. Performance can vary widely. It’s easy to find “popular” brands on Amazon that seemingly have lots of positive reviews, but ultimately fail in performance. Many of these cartridges run out quickly, print unevenly with streaks, print very lightly even though your printer is set on the darkest setting, don’t work at all / are not detected properly, and lots of other issues. This is why I felt sharing our find with you would be helpful. It took a lot of trial and error and we have been using them for years, which is why I’m comfortable passing this information along.
The only time we have ever truly needed to go with OEM printer supplies was for our thermal transfer label printers, particularly from Brother. We found the print quality was substantially better with OEM printer labels for these units, but for desktop/office laser printers we always go with a 3rd party and have never seen a meaningful difference in print quality.
Hope this helps, and if you’d like more tips be sure to see more at ElliotHelps.com
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