Do you think it would be easy to refill colour toners for a colour laser? Most people do! There are, however, several hurdles to overcome. First, think about plain black printing. If a page is printed in black, it doesn't matter if it is comes out dark grey, jet black, or any shade in between. Our brain still sees it as "black". Consider now colour printing. You can tell if something about the colour in a colour picture is not quite right. If the colour looks washed out, or too rich, or too yellow or blue, we can always tell. The human eye is particularly sensitive to different colours - in fact the human eye can distinguish between tens of thousands of different hues. That's why our printer monitors have moved on from 256 colours to 32 million colours! So, the first hurdle to overcome when trying to refill color toner is to match exactly the colour that the genuine manufacturer has. Not easy at all, as they have spent millions of dollars developing that toner for that machine and have stringent steps in their manufacturing plant to ensure there are no variations from batch to batch, and that the last cartridge to come out of the plant is exactly the same colour as the first. The companies that try to copy the genuine toner haven't got a hope of matching the original manufacturers toner colour as the formula is patented and a closely guarded secret. If the colour of the refill toner isn't going to match, the colours are going to be wacky!

The next point is the density of the toner. Did you know that genuine toner is ground up more finely? If you could look at toner under a microscope, the original genuine toner granules look small and spherical, whereas refill toner looks large, chunky and uneven. This affects the way toner is laid onto a page - genuine toner is laid on evenly and looks sharp and refill color toner looks fuzzy and there is some 'bleed' evident under a loupe. This also affects how adjoining colours look, not to mention extra wear and tear on printer components such as drums and fuser units.

If you want clear, sharp prints from your colour laser make sure you use genuine toner cartridges. If the colours on your printouts look strange or washed out, check to see that someone hasn't refilled the toners with non-genuine toner or that generic toners haven't been used.