Thanks, “thochad.”

Penny and I got this new Brother HL-2170w printer to replace our old inkjet that had been melted by the space heater, and we liked it a lot. (Not the meltage, but the new printer. It’s fast, prints well — if only in black and white — and because it can do its thing wirelessly, I don’t have to look at it. It squats over in another room near the office.)

My affection for the Brother was dimmed mightily yesterday, when it refused to print any more pages until it got a new toner cartridge. The prints didn’t go gray, or splotchy, or anything — just an error message and no more printouts.

Now, the guy at Staples had said this would happen, and soon, so I’d bought an extra toner cartridge already. But still. We’ve had this thing about nine weeks, and printed *maybe* a hundred sheets of paper with it. And the new cartridge was something like $40.

When I opened the box to replace my “starter cartridge,” I saw why it’s so expensive. This little jobber is no plastic pouch of ink; no sir. It’s got a roller, some levers, little plastic gears and tiny clear portholes on each end of the assembly. Can it really be necessary to replace all that just to get some more ink in the printer?

The waste of it bothered me. Here I was going to pull out a mechanism probably more advanced and with more moving parts than the Model T, after it had served its purpose for slightly longer than I can stand on one leg.

“Oh well,” I figured. “At least I can take it back to Staples so Brother can reuse it.”

But most people won’t go to the trouble, I don’t bet. And thus thousands, if not millions, of these TN-330 cartridges, which were carefully designed, precision manufactured and most likely shipped across the Pacific before hopping on an 18-wheeler to make it all the way to the Staples that would sell them, would swiftly be chucked into landfills.

Mottainai.

That’s the Japanese word that springs to mind, and it loosely translates as “a sense of regret concerning waste when the intrinsic value of an object or resource is not properly utilized.”

In English, less elegantly but no less emphatically, we might say, “Ah, sheesh. What a %$&#’n waste.”

And you’d think that Brother Industries Ltd., headquartered in Nagoya, would get that. Maybe they do. There’s an economic reality to selling hundred-dollar printers, and part of that reality these days appears to be that you have to shortchange your customers on an essential part of the product just to keep your prices competitive.

Plus, who knows? Maybe it really is a “scam” to get you to buy more $40 cartridges so that the narrow profit (or even a loss?) on the printer itself is offset. I’m not sure I’m quite that cynical just yet.

But thanks to thochad, the commenter ranked “Most Helpful” on Amazon.com’s page for this product, I don’t have to personally suffer this egregious mottainai.

“There is a clear plastic circle at each end of the toner cartridge. The printer shines a light through to see how full the toner is. Simply cover one of them with a piece of opaque tape, and the printer will think that the toner is full. I’ve already gotten 1500+ pages out of the starter toner that was “empty” at 983, with no difference in printed quality.”

I haven’t tried it yet, but I don’t doubt it will work. Countless other commenters chimed in with success stories.

Still, though. Why did they do it that way? Does the low-toner window-light-thingy preserve the printer’s internal workings? Am I (are we, thochad and his comrades and I) prematurely wearing out our HL-2170s by forcing them to print with depleted toner?

Or are we just getting hundreds of extra uses out of an item that wasn’t really used up at all?

And lastly, do you even care? Or is this post just another example of the dreaded Moe-Tai-Nigh?

I hope not. I’ve tried to use the model numbers specifically so that maybe other people searching for answers (or just more toner) could have a better chance of finding this page. But even if they don’t, thochad has ‘em covered.

Ever think you’d see the day that the internet would help you *avoid* wasting time and money?