02 Aug

Beware The Friendly Toner Telemarketer

I wrote an article about a company called ‘Deltec Manufacturing’ that sells printer toner cartridges at inflated prices. Much closer to home is ‘The Better Image’. They are a Melbourne based company that have called me several times over the past few months also trying to sell me toner cartridges at inflated prices.

I had another call today and the ‘special deal’ they had was for $165 for one of their ‘high yield’ toner cartridges. On checking some prices I found another Australian distributor that had a 3 pack of ‘standard’ toners for $135 – which is less than $50 per toner cartridge. I don’t believe that high yield toner cartridges can produce 3 times the number of pages that a standard toner can. My own research suggested that most standard toners can do 1600-2000 pages and high yield are around 5000 pages. I also found that most high yield toners that could print 5000-6000 pages were still under $100.

I did a lot of searching and wasn’t able to find any distributor that stocked ‘high yield’ toners for my HP 1102.

Unlike the other toner company, The Better Image do have a website. It has a page titled ‘Page Yields’ which actually tells you nothing about what you can expect from their toner cartridges. What’s even more disturbing is that they are currently the subject of an investigation that involves corruption, government departments and the purchase of toner cartridges at highly inflated prices. Apparently an (ex)  employee from Arts Victoria bought enough toner to last them around 40 years.

You can read more about The Better Image and its parent company, Consumable Management Group in this article.