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I have an Xerox Phaser 6500DN printer that is telling me it has "low black toner". But I know there is still sufficient toner in it, and I would like to trick it into thinking that there is still a lot of toner left. A friend of mine has a Brother black and white printer that was telling him it was out of toner a year ago. Then my friend put a piece of electrical tape on part of the toner cartridge and it still prints now, a year later. I was wondering if I could do this on my Phaser printer, but taking out the black cartridge shows no obvious hole to cover up. What can I do?

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  • With a "toner low" message the printer will still print. And, I use compatibles in mine (actually, a CM305DF, but same engine), so I don't have to worry about cost. See, for example, inktechnologies.com/…
    – hdhondt
    Feb 12, 2017 at 22:27
  • No, the message is "Replace black" and it refuses to print. It has been saying "black low" for a while but only "replace black" recently, and with that the refusal to print.
    – user631567
    Feb 13, 2017 at 12:07

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With a "replace black" message, it is conceivable you can get the printer to continue, but I do not recommend it. I recommend getting a new (OEM or third party) toner cartridge.

My reason is this. This printer has a very long toner pipe between the cartridge and the drum. As a result, the printer could theoretically print for a long time after the cartridge is empty. However, when you eventually replace the cartridge there will be a long empty section in the toner pipe, and you may end up not having any black on your prints, without the printer realising there is a problem.

I found this out on my Fuji Xerox CM305DF, which has the same print engine. Using third party cartridges I found that images with very heavy toner coverage were not fused correctly. I could fix it by telling the printer I was using heavyweight paper, but it will not duplex on that.

I was thinking of going back to OEM cartridges when I realised that I had used 2 sets of third party cartridges before the problem showed up - that's how long the toner pipe is. So I could expect to use 2 sets of Xerox cartridges before it fixed itself. Hence I decided to live with the problem, and continue to print at 3 cents per colour page, instead of 15 cents.

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