Jansepar.com

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.