aftermaket toner from konica

[cqb1988]

Konica started ship the toner with "E" for my color machine, now i am having fusing problem and color variation , tech told these toner are not made by konica, they were purchased from 3rd party. and today i got TN017H for my black white, I think i saw one of the member here had problem with "H" toner, but I couldnt find where the post is, anyone had problem with those "new" toner?

 

[gregbatch]

Yesterday I received a magenta in a generic box with a faded magenta label on the side. I'm not too eager to put it in my machine. I'll report back when I do.

 

[kdw75]

I thought these companies always warned against using 3rd party supplies.

 

[Digi_Wiz]

I haven't had a single issue with the 'E' toner from Konica yet. I have been shipped a good few orders of it as well.

 

[kslight]

When i had a Konica i noticed towards the end (few weeks ago) the last shipments we were receiving had the E and some different stickers on the box. I have a hunch that the E designates it came from a different factory. If you ordered it directly from Konica I wouldn’t even consider it being aftermarket / and even if it is it’s not your problem because it came from Konica…I would tell the tech to just fix the machine, not give you excuses. How many times have we heard techs stomp their feet for two hours and blame issues entirely on paper, humidity, electricity, files…only for the machine to need parts.

 

[cqb1988]

When i had a Konica i noticed towards the end (few weeks ago) the last shipments we were receiving had the E and some different stickers on the box. I have a hunch that the E designates it came from a different factory. If you ordered it directly from Konica I wouldn’t even consider it being aftermarket / and even if it is it’s not your problem because it came from Konica…I would tell the tech to just fix the machine, not give you excuses. How many times have we heard techs stomp their feet for two hours and blame issues entirely on paper, humidity, electricity, files…only for the machine to need parts.

they were able to "fix" the machine, I have to lower the 120ppm machine to 80ppm, and increase fusing temp by 20c to get stable fusing on heavy coverage cardstock. the problem started after I put the e toner in, maybe the c12000 is too new, and has some unknown issues.

 

[criccidisk]

We just encountered this same scenario on our Konica-Minolta AccurioPresses. We purchased and service our machines through a Konica-Minolta authorized reseller, and it's safe to say this toner is legitimate. According to their service manager, the "H" ("hybrid") toners come from a different Konica-Minolta factory and use a slightly different formula for their composition as evidenced by the sketchy boxes. There's apparently a service bulletin posted on these new toners as well.

Unfortunately for us, this wrecked havoc our AccurioPress 6120 for about a week. We developed prints with hazy gray backgrounds and random black scratch marks. Switched developer, developing unit, drums--no dice. The only solution was to keep running prints until all the old non-H toner was out of the machine--which as you might imagine unfortunately takes a long time and a loooot of clicks. Obviously this also is an annoyance with the paper shortage.

Thankfully, the quality problems haven't returned on our 6120 and we've been going strong for about a week with exclusively the new toner. Double-thankfully, I haven't noticed quality problems on our c6100 or c4080 just yet with the newer toner, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens just given the change in formula.

If you're also encountering issues and your service team is scratching their head, my strongest advice is to stick with whichever flavor of toner you have the most of for as long as possible. Since our new shipments all feature new labeling, we tossed all of our old toner into a corner for emergency usage only.

 

[GrayDogPress]

We just encountered this same scenario on our Konica-Minolta AccurioPresses. We purchased and service our machines through a Konica-Minolta authorized reseller, and it's safe to say this toner is legitimate. According to their service manager, the "H" ("hybrid") toners come from a different Konica-Minolta factory and use a slightly different formula for their composition as evidenced by the sketchy boxes. There's apparently a service bulletin posted on these new toners as well.

Unfortunately for us, this wrecked havoc our AccurioPress 6120 for about a week. We developed prints with hazy gray backgrounds and random black scratch marks. Switched developer, developing unit, drums--no dice. The only solution was to keep running prints until all the old non-H toner was out of the machine--which as you might imagine unfortunately takes a long time and a loooot of clicks. Obviously this also is an annoyance with the paper shortage.

Thankfully, the quality problems haven't returned on our 6120 and we've been going strong for about a week with exclusively the new toner. Double-thankfully, I haven't noticed quality problems on our c6100 or c4080 just yet with the newer toner, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens just given the change in formula.

If you're also encountering issues and your service team is scratching their head, my strongest advice is to stick with whichever flavor of toner you have the most of for as long as possible. Since our new shipments all feature new labeling, we tossed all of our old toner into a corner for emergency usage only.

We are under a lease contract with Konica directly for our printers and have excellent factory service. We recently saw the same thing come up about a month ago and the tech was a bit confused at first until he got hold of some service alerts about the change of toner suppliers. Pretty much the same story, drive it down until there is not a lot of toner left and then cycle the new stuff through until it gets its act together. After getting past that the 6120s have been running fine, but have not encountered any off-label toners for the color system as of yet. Since toner has been, like paper, in short supply, tossing all of the stuff that had the bad print was less than amusing.

 

[Craig]

Had the same issue with the "H" toner and ghosting images. The tech showed me a tech pub that sad to remove the toner bottle, replace with an empty and run 99,999 solid black sheets to drain the hopper. I asked him where his paper was to do this and he said we are supposed to supply and ample amount of paper to troubleshoot the machine per the contract. I laughed and told him he better get his toner vac out and start sucking.

 

[Shredder]

Is there any GOOD aftermarket toner?

 

[jwheeler]

Unfortunately, we are also having the ghosting issue with the H toner on all 3 of our 6136's...so it's definitely the toner and not a machine issue. Our tech said it's happening at his other accounts and there doesn't seem to be a great fix for it. At this point, we're only getting shipped the H toner, so we don't even have an alternative. The tech vacuumed out all of the toner and replaced the developer and some other parts as a possible fix, but no luck.

We also started getting the "E" toners for our C6085 and C7090. Haven't used it yet because we had a decent stockpile of the original toner. We're avoiding it as long as possible.

 

[crajos]

Reviving this topic as my shop just received some of the "E" toners. My supplier hasn't been able to get ahold of Magenta in particular. Konica has a firmware update and a service bulletin issued for these toners. Firmware was updated on our C3080 yesterday. From what I can tell, it enables additional toner density adjustment access. You can turn on an option to show the toner density fine adjustment on the user side, and in the service side it enables the ability to take density adjustments further than what is normally available, and run the press without toner installed so you can run the developer hopper out of toner.

What my tech and I were kicking around though, is that if we need a developer swap, the new developer is going to come with the original toner in the bag. Nobody has heard about "H" or "E" toner developer powders. It's not stated, but I would imagine if we were already running the "E" toner, they would expect us to remove the toner bottle and run the new developer out of toner as well. The bulletin calls for a service tech to run a duplex test pattern for 10-15 minutes until the toner hopper is empty, install the new toner, then run it for another 2,000-3,000 sheets depending on the model. This would need to be done for each color that's replaced with the new toner. I'm not expecting a credit for the clicks or a check for the paper.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to tap into those "E" toners sooner rather than later. Hopefully we don't see a major change in density, but I'm expecting a pain in the neck day working through it, and will need to re-profile the press.