Resetting The Page Count On A Laser Printer

[Brian] really liked his Samsung color laser printer right up until it was time to replace the toner cartridges. A full set of toner cartridges sell for about the same price as the printer itself, so [Brian] figured he could simply refill the toner in the cartridges he already has. The printer sends out the ‘low toner’ warning  based on page count and won’t print if the page count is too high, negating the economy of a toner refill kit. Luckily, [Brian] figured out a dead simple way to reset the page count so he can use those third-party refill kits.

All the configuration settings and page counts for the printer are stored on an I2C EEPROM. After dumping the data held on this EEPROM with an Arduino and sniffing everything going into the EEPROM with a Bus Pirate, [Brian] was nearly at his wit’s end. Thankfully, serendipity intervened. When [Brian] restarted the printer with the Bus Pirate attached, he noticed it took much longer to initialize. Printing a configuration report, he was trilled to see that all page counts have been zeroed.

The final hack that allows [Brian] to reset the page count and used refilled toner cartridges is a simple wire that ties the SDA line of the EEPROM to ground on boot. [Brian] used a momentary switch, but given this is a once-every-few-months operation, a simple wire would suffice. Check out [Brian]’s page reset demo after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=077GLsEMV2E&w=470]

101 thoughts on “Resetting The Page Count On A Laser Printer

  1. Love this hack, I installed a tac switch to reset whenever I wanted too :)

    OK, now after many years of great service my printer has issues, thinking of getting the clp-415 or the 680, I know both can be refilled easily, but can they be reset in a similar way ?

    TIA.

  2. Sorry for us CLP 325 owners, it does not work. I tried with different processes but either it prints blank page or it returns to the initial state which is same before doing the hack… Time wasted; experience gained. Result = this comment.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.