Sick and tired of “Toner Low”, “Prepare New Toner Cartridge”, or even “Toner End of Life”?
Here’s a little hack for you people out there who have a Brother MFC-9840CDW and want to squeeze a few more copies out of your toner cartridges. Keep in mind, this can probably void your warranty so do it at your own risk.
This works on both standard, and high-yield toner cartridges.
There are two components to this: 1) The hardware aspect: There is a laser or something that shoots through a clear plastic seethrough circle (on both sides) of the toner. 2) The software aspect: The toner counter has to be reset.
Let’s get to it:
Hardware
Remove the toner tray and remove a single toner cartridge. On the either side of the toner cartridge you should see a clear plastic circle that should have traces of the color of the toner possibly on it. PLEASE NOTE: This is located on the side of the toner cartridge, don’t mess with anything else. Simply tear a small peice of paper and put some tape on the back, and slap it on the clear plastic. You only need to do this on one side per cartridge. This will fool the printer in to thinking that physically the toner has ink in it.
Software
I could be wrong, but the printer recognizes whether or not your using a standard or high-yield toner cartridges and keeps track of how many pages you print, and how much ink you use. You will need to reset this to clear the “Toner End of Life” message which stops you from printing. First you need to cover the toner holes as mentioned above in “Hardware”. Then you can proceed with this.
Open the front of the machine (as if you were wanting to get access to the toner cartridges). Now hit the “Clear/Back” button. This will open a secret menu on the front of the printer. Depending on whether you are using Standard to High Yield cartridges, you will want to use the menu to reset the counters for the applicable toner cartridges. There is 2 options (one for standard, and one for high yield) for each color of cartridge.
After this, you should be able to print again!