HP 96A Black Toner Cartridge (C4096A)

Poor Quality - Poor Warranty

I am the general manager of a multi-office support center. We do support for almost everything that does not have to do with technology. Because we regularly send dedicated user manuals, we go through...Read complete review

I am the general manager of a multi-office support center. We do support for almost everything that does not have to do with technology. Because we regularly send dedicated user manuals, we go through toner like crazy. We not only buy paper by the pallet but we also buy the toner cartridges by the dozen. We bought several doze of these and just recently I found out that printers were going out of service because they were giving bad prints. No idea how long this had been going on but this is very costly as people are then waiting for the prints and customers are getting upset because of the slow turn around. It turns out that all the prints out of these printers looked really bad. The paper look like it was dirty, there was ghosting and several lines across. Since we had only used HP toners since day 1 I assume that HP would check it out for me. Well I was wrong, HP support wanted me to take the printers to a shop (more time and money). In addition because of these 3 printer been "bad" several new/full cartridges were opened and they got ruined because no matter what printer they were used it printed bad. Well no soon after that we ran out of toner way sooner than expected and I needed toner FAST. So I sent our intern to get a dozen toner cartridges ASAP. It turns out that the small office store closest to our offices only had generic cartridges. When he arrived he change the cartridge on ALL the machines including the "bad" ones. Well lo and behold the printers started printing clean copies again. Last week we had some breathing time so we ran some tests to see if the printer maybe "rested" and got "healed". It turned out to be the HP cartridges. They were defective. We are going through all of the cartridges marked to be recycled to see which still have a lot of toner and print bad (so far 8 of them or over $1000). Because we had bought them almost a year ago our Staples rep told us that the manufacturer should take care of that. Now we are working with HP again to see if we can get them return. But I am not too worry as I found out in the short amount of time I have save almost $2000 in toner cost by using generic (plus all my printers are operational). In addition, we think (we still have to do the math) the nee generic cartridges are yielding more pages. The sad part is that Staples does not carry generic for our HP2200s.