Any hope for a bad laser printer cartridge?

TV2 said:

Whenever I see Canon X25 laser printer cartridges for cheap I scoop them up. Many times these are open box or damaged box items from Ebay, but the cartridge is still in the sealed bag and often works just fine.

This last on didn't. The box looked like it went through war, but the cartridge was still sealed.

When I installed it it was printing double and smudged and was pretty unacceptable. I swapped it out for another one and that one is printing fine - sharp and clean.

Question is, has anyone ever got a cartridge like this to come clean? Maybe if you run it a bunch of times? Or is it if it's bad it's always bad and just throw it away?

I'm not certain if this condition is similar to what I've experienced or not.

I've seen jobber replacement cartridges that produce illegible documents that appear not dark enough and often blurry. Believe it or not, the solution I found and successfully used numerous times was to shake the cartridge vigorously, side to side.

In some cases, it wasn't much effort to restore to a perfect print result while others took a significant and repeated treatment for the same results.

I accepted it as a calculated risk when buying inexpensive generic cartridges for a Brother MFC-9330.

I hope this helps.

TV2 said:

Yes, I've done that with this cartridge and others. It often work great if the toner has "caked" inside the hopper.

But no joy doing it on this one.
Thanks for the tip!

That's unfortunate. I do recall that at least one of the cartridges I restored was a lengthy affair and a serious PITA which had me questioning the sense in trying to save a buck with marginal cartridges.

Does the resulting print quality appear similar to deficiencies you've corrected by agitation in the past?