Toners in plain brown boxes

[copyman]

Awhile back I had asked this forum about the kon min plain brown boxes with white labels. Some of the replies were it was crap toner, or "dirt in a bottle", etc. Come to find out these toners are genuine and the letters after the #'s like TN324JK designate the factory it was made at. After the explosion at the "only" toner factory for Kon Min and shortage of toner around the world for about a year they now have several factories making toner. I was always puzzled why they would have relied on one factory for all their toners. They lost a lot of dealers & customers because of this fiasco!

This info about brown boxes & white labels came directly from a Kon-Min district service rep.

[KMFLT3CH]

Re: Toners in plain brown boxes

I don't even look at the boxes anymore, but the bottle inside them.

On the I-series bottles if the label just past the colored pull-out handle doesn't say KM + logo and it has 3 small rectangular holes in the front of the handle, from my experience it's junk.

On the 8 series bottles if the front of the bottle is cut into waves instead of being a smooth circle all around, it's junk.

Maybe "genuine" but definitely not the same stuff from a few years ago. 90% of the service calls on these I-series for poor quality, dirty background, drums crapping out at 50% or developer units dumping have been due to these specific toners in use. Just last week I had a customer call in for void lines on color output, machine had less than 50k on it. Magenta dev unit dumping toner all over the inside and sure enough the M toner was the only different one of the four in use. I've had to vacuum out so many hoppers and replace dev/drums it's absurd. Some even needed the HV board to bring it back to 100%. On the 8 series with bad toners, I see TCR ratings shooting up well into the double digits when using bad toners.

[blazebusiness]

Re: Toners in plain brown boxes

Awhile back I had asked this forum about the kon min plain brown boxes with white labels. Some of the replies were it was crap toner, or "dirt in a bottle", etc. Come to find out these toners are genuine and the letters after the #'s like TN324JK designate the factory it was made at. After the explosion at the "only" toner factory for Kon Min and shortage of toner around the world for about a year they now have several factories making toner. I was always puzzled why they would have relied on one factory for all their toners. They lost a lot of dealers & customers because of this fiasco!

This info about brown boxes & white labels came directly from a Kon-Min district service rep.

It does seem to me that we now get a lot more toner related calls and dumping after the new brown box oem toner came out. I suspect something is a bit off compared to before.

And it can be difficult to diagnose as we generally eliminate toner as the primary cause after verifying the machine has all oem toners.

Also, most of the generics are way worse and do so much harm, the customer often ends up with a big repair bill after trying to save $$$$ by using the generic ones.
The only customers that insist on using a generic but seem to be escaping the issues that go along with compatible Konica toner are the ones that use the "Youtop" brand on Amazon or the USA made TAA compliant toner sold by ACM.

Still, a huge mistake to use any generic in my opinion, the quality simply isn't there.
There are also some white label boxes with the Konica logo on the box made in Taiwan being sold as oem, but I wonder if that's truly the case. Suspicious.......

[copyman]

Re: Toners in plain brown boxes

The brown box with white labels are the toners I was talking about being genuine (See attached). Nothing suspicious about it. These are directly from Konica Minolta and definitely "genuine" toners!
Agree that they could make a better looking label considering they are in the print business!