MP C407 toner icons on display

[tonerhead]

I had a customer run out of magenta this week, they said display icon at 50%. I pulled the yellow and cyan toner and they were nearly drained yet panel indicated about 50% remaining. Any thoughts on why and how to correct?

[guitar9199]

Most likely they're pulling the tubes out, and reinserting them...thinking the machine will "Run Longer" if it thinks it has more toner.

Tell them like I do.... "If the machine says 'Prepare new toner', just make sure you have one on hand...but don't do ANYTHING until it actually stops and asks for a new tube. Otherwise you're just wasting toner."

...most of them get it.

Those little "remaining toner" icons are just a best-guess estimate anyway.

[tonerhead]

I've seen that on non-chipped tubes, but on chipped tubes, normally it is within the ballpark, but this one is way off. It is a toner inclusive contract and our tighta$$ mgmt won't give this customer extra toner to store. FM audit shows toner in machine even when out because machine was reporting 40% when it ran out. So it doesn't trigger a ship toner alert. Mgmt has restock alert set to 20%.

Been fixing this crap since 1990. The copier market really went to crap once one company decided to sell toner inclusive contracts. Lots of money sitting on customers shelves in toner and sales monkeys paring the cpc to the barebone. No profit in this industry anymore.

[guitar9199]

Do a service printout, and check how many pages they're running at over 20-30%. We have one customer that's going through toner like a shop-vac, and when I did a printout I saw that more than 75% of what they were printing was over 60% coverage!! Those bottles are rated for 5%, so it started to make sense.

[tonerhead]

Thanks again for replying. I suppose I could do that. However, I thought the Ricoh's used a pixel counting system to determine amount remaining. This gets away from the % of coverage. I don't think the more recent models use the old page count system anymore, it is all pixel count. That takes %coverage out of the equation for toner remaining calculation.

If mgmt would just give them extra toner this would be a non issue. The others of this series that I have seem to report timely and correctly. Bottom line is customer doesn't want to be down because of running out of toner (understandable) and mgmt does not want to give out extra. Trouble with mgmt is they are bean counters anymore rather than doing right by the customer. I have already set up a toner alert in @remote for 50%. Just hope mgmt doesn't find out because they will make me change it.

[slimslob]

They might be using MP C406 toner. Toner is the same but the color yield is less, 6K instead of 8K.

[keithxxiii]

We set SP 3110 to 10% in older models before to prevent customer's from replacing toners by themselves. This feature somehow delays the near end display on the screen.