Usually printer ink manufacturers say an ink or toner cartridge is enough to print this or that amount of pages. Little is known of how actually this number is defined. Yes, we know that they use a 5% coverage page and print continuously until a cartridge (or several cartridges – to get consistent result) is empty. But that doesn’t have much to do with real life printing.

Unfortunately, you can’t know beforehand how many pages a cartridge will print, but you are fortunate to know there is a good way to count the pages that has been printed. (Name your own reason why would want to do that.)

Good thing is this way of counting printed pages does not require any additional software (though there is some,) except for Windows XP installed. Bad thing is you won’t get specific, detailed information like page size, printing quality mode, color and other settings.

Let’s start our way to get the printed pages counted. (more…)

Toner Cartridge Depot proudly announces that

A new home page is born

For several years TCD has been having the main page intact. But time go on, so does life, and what was current once, is obsolete now. “The time has come” — that is what we decided and released a new version of the home page.

Truth be told, that was a protracted labor: our team has walked the long path of trial and error before the main page could see this world, or I’d better say ‘before this world could see the page.’

Here we must warn you, unlike on the picture above, in real life tabs don’t switch automatically. You will have to click the tabs yourself!

So what’s new?

• The list of brands has changed its look. Now you can see the size of font is smaller for less popular brands and is larger for more popular brands.
• The Supply Finder has moved to a personal tab and its larger font won’t let you click a wrong menu item by mistake.
• The Bestsellers now have their own tab, too. How could that be helpful to me, you may ask? The Bestsellers are cartridges that sell best for they are popular, that is compatible with popular printers, and the chances are you printer is one of those. Tag line is: find your toner cartridge faster!
• A tab with Hot Deals. A bit of advertisement never hurts, you know. Besides, this section of the store offers cartridges at prices that are really hard to resist.
• Bottom line is… well, actually it’s a bottom row — the most current information on discounts and gifts available in the store.

The idea behind the makeover of the main page was to give it a modern look and. More importantly, make it more convenient for you, our customers.

You are welcome to share you opinion on the new home page.

Toner Cartridge Depot team

Just a couple of months ago Samsung bolstered world’s smallest color laser printer (http://blog.tonercartridgedepot.com/2008/03/12/worlds-smallest-color-laser-printer-samsung-clp-310/). The other day the company broke its own record: it rolled out the new smallest color printer in the world – Samsung CLP-315K.

The new tiny printer measures only 388 x 313 x 243 mm and weighs around 11 kilos. Compared to previous generation, the dimensions have shrunk by 20%.

Despite the size, the Samsung CLP-315K color laser printer uses Samsung toner cartridges, delivers 4 color or 16 black and white pages per minute at 2400×600 dpi resolution and has 32 Mb on board.

There is also a multifunction version of this printer, CLX-3175FNK (the left one on the picture with cute Korean girls). This MFP features not only direct print from various devices such as flash-drives, cameras, mobile phones, but it also supports scanning of documents directly to removable storage.

The two devices are yet available in Korea only, but it should not take long for them to appear on American and European markets.

The Xerox’s research lab demonstrated reusable paper. No, no, not recyclable which is any paper, but reusable. Information printed on it disappears in 24 hours. The developers claim a sheet of such paper can be use up to 100 times without compromising quality, of print presumably.

From the outside, the paper looks like an A4 sheet. From the inside, however, it is made of thousands of UV-sensitive molecules that interact with UV radiation of printer and change their properties. A day later, the molecules exposed to the radiation change back to initial properties. So, no toner is needed.

Currently, this technology only works for black-and-white printing. The very printers are so compact that they can be mobile.

Xerox first announced the reusable papers late in 2006. At that time, the paper was said to keep printed info 16 to 24 hours and be reused up to 50 times.

A question remains whether the new paper would be durable enough, since I can’t think of how gentle one should handle a printed sheet so that it lasts 100 reuses.