Ricoh SP C232 cartridge at end of life...I don't think So!

[Foo]

Most of us on here have been doing this a while and can sometimes tell whats wrong with a unit by a sound or squeak or rattle.

And sometimes...weight. This is my personal printer I'm talking about now and not one of my customers.

It's giving me an "End of Life" message about the yellow cartridge. I ordered a OEM extended life yellow for it. It arrived this morning.

I pulled it out of the box and set it next to the printer and removed the failing one.
In the instant I picked up the "used" one I noticed it felt full of toner.
I did the "tap tap tap" on the toner area of the cartridge and not a bit of hollow sound...it's full.

Almost all of our printing (95%) is B&W. Approximately 5000 prints since we changed all the cartridges at the same time...this one is the only one at end of life...LOL and it's the yellow.

So what to do...I have this new cartridge sitting here ready, but I'm just really sure this current one isn't really end of life.

Ideas or solutions?

Thanks
Jeff D in STL

[rthonpm]

I've got the same printer in my office, and we've never been able to get the full number of pages out of the HA versions of the cartridges. The printer isn't used that frequently so I thought there had to be an issue, but when I looked at the coverage per centages, they were where you would expect for black and white, but when it was used for colour, the coverages were all above 25%.

There were also a couple of firmware updates about seven years back to try and reduce toner consumption during process control. You can actually get those right from the regular Ricoh website.