Troubleshooter

As Brother cartridges are completely unchipped the printer relies on physically looking inside the ink cartridge in order to establish whether the cartridge it full or empty.  As a result, if the printer was reading the cartridge as being full when first installed and it's now reading as being empty then this is likely to be an accurate reading; if in doubt, many Brother compatible cartridges are transparent and so the amount of ink remaining can be checked. 

Please note, in order to avoid doing damage to the printer it would be normal for it to leave a small amount of ink in the used cartridge.

While manufacturers give an page yield for cartridges, realistically the amount of prints you will get from a cartridge is likely to be much less than this. This is because manufacturers use a standard page coverage of 5% (set by ISO/IEC 19752) to determine page yield.

Please also note that performing a printer head clean does use a moderate amount of ink.  The printer will also periodically clean the printer heads which will result in a small amount of ink being continuously dispensed even if the cartridge isn't actually being used for the purpose of printing.

If you are concerned that you may not be getting sufficient pages from your cartridges or would simply like to check what kind of page coverage you are printing we have written an article on a free program to calculate coverage.

If after reading the above you believe that the cartridge still should have lasted substantially longer than you achieved then please do contact us as it's possible that you have received a faulty unit.