New Printers from HP – HP LaserJet M203, M227 Series

Tuesday, March 21st, 2017 | HP Toner

HP has just released a new series of HP LaserJet printers, the M203 and M227 MFP. This printer appears to be a replacement for the P1102w line of printers. Like their last release, the M102 series, these new printers use dual cartridge technology. This means you instead of one consumable to keep track of, you have two: a toner cartridge and an imaging drum cartridge. The printers are inexpensive and at the disposable end of the HP LaserJet range.

Theoretically a two cartridge system make sense, as there doesn’t seem to be a need to replace your imaging drum every time you change your toner cartridge, assuming your drum isn’t worn out.

There are several problems with this system.

It is more expensive.
Let’s compare two comparable HP printers with new HP toner/drum cartridges.
The P1102w uses the CE285A toner cartridge, with a page yield of 1,600. We sell the genuine HP CF285A for $68.99, or 4.3 cents per page.
Now take let’s look at the new HP M203dn. It uses the CF230A Toner, 1,600 page yield, our price $64.34, plus the CF232A imaging drum, 23,000 page yield, our price $91.19. Cost per page on the imaging drum is 0.39 cents per page. Cost per page on the CF230A toner cartridge is 4.02 cents. So your total cost per page is 4.41 cents per page vs. 4.3 cents per page. While it doesn’t cost much more, still you are paying more for an inferior system. You can get the price down by buying the CF230X high yield toner cartridge, but I didn’t have an equivalent cartridge to compare it to for this example.
It’s more complex and difficult to troubleshoot.
Say your printer develops a line down the lefthand side of the page. Normally we say change out the toner cartridge and 99% of the time the problem is solved. Simplicity is the beauty of the one cartridge system. With a two cartridge system, you first have to try the toner cartridge, and if that doesn’t work you have to try the imaging drum. This means more hassle and more cost.
It will be difficult to remanufacture / recycle these cartridges.
One aspect of these new two cartridge systems is that there is virtually no waste toner reservoir. While this fact doesn’t concern the average printer user, is does concern us as a toner cartridge manufacturer. It means that the transfer efficiency must be at virtually 100%. Right now we cannot achieve such high transfer rates with the toner and drums that are available to us. The bottom line is we won’t have a remanufactured product for this system for some time. So if you typically use remanufactured cartridges, you will be spending more money buying Genuine OEM.
No MICR availability…for now.
At least for now, we cannot produce a CF230A MICR Toner cartridge. We are actively working with our toner manufacturers to get a toner cartridge that won’t damage the drum cartridge by overfilling the waste reservoir. We can get a cartridge to work, but with the lower transfer efficiencies, the drum cartridge will fill up with wasted toner long before it’s time. So until we can achieve near perfect efficiency you will not be able to print checks with this printer.

We still recommend HP printers, but we advise you avoid any of the two cartridge system printers. It appears HP is only going to this two cartridge system on their lower end printers. Another brand we recommend is Canon. Traditionally HP printers were actually manufactured by Canon. In addition to making great printers, Canon also provides a much thinner driver with less bloatware than HP. When you install Canon drivers, you’ll notice how quickly the drivers install and how they don’t load you up with software that you don’t need.

We are stocking both the standard HP CF230A and high capacity CF230X toner cartridges, as well as the CF232A Imaging Drum Cartridge.