CN Color Laser Trick">Brother 3040 CN Color Laser Trick
Found this to be very helpful — hopefully you Googlers out there do too.
I have a color laser printer at home, Brother 3040CN, and recently, it told me I was out of ink. I looked at the prices of the toner, and in order to replace all four, it would set me back $180! I figured there has to be another way, and there was.
I stumbled across the following page, all credit for what I’m going to post comes from here:
http://jassenbowman.com/brain-matter/brother-printer-toner-nightmares/
It listed out three options: cover the sensors, hit the mechanical reset, or find the secret set of key combinations to reset the perceived toner levels. I went in looking for the first option, but found the third to work just fine. I searched for “3040” within the page, and found this awesome set of instructions:
1. Open the top cover and hit “Cancel” and “Secure Print” at the same time. The display will show the toner cartridge menu.
2. Scroll up and down through the 4 cartridges, and press OK twice on each entry. It will show “Accepted” for each reset.
3. Print away! You’re done here, you’ve tricked the printer into thinking there is more toner, because there IS and clearly Brothers reporting is fauly.
I would love to hear an explanation on this, because either this is some sort of terrible mistake, or Brother is really swindling us out of our money (I’m guessing more likely the latter).
Also, another juicy tidbit for the printer — if you want to view the ink levels, hit OK twice, print settings, and then press “Go”.
Hopefully some of you out there find this helpful! It saved me a good few bucks.