Brother - LC203BK XL High-Yield Ink Cartridge - Black

Great ink and service from Brother..always use Brither for my printing needs

Horrible. I don't print often so I am very surprised how often I need to replace ink cartridges.

Don't bother with a response. I won't be back to read it. I had a yellow cartridge and a black cartridge go empty yesterday WHILE I WAS AT LUNCH. The yellow one is an XL and was 80% full when I left for lunch and the black one, also an XL and it was 25% full when I left. The ink seems to evaporate.

The problem appears to be that these cartridges just go bad. Sitting on a shelf in their original sealed packaging or installed in the printer, the ink just seems to vanish over time. I don't have a need to print daily or even weekly. I have used a number of printers and printer technologies over the years. My favorite is STILL the old clunky HP LaserJet 4000. Cartridges print as many pages as advertised or more. They stay fresh for (literally) years whether on the shelf or installed. This is just not true of this brother printer. I bought a 4pack of genuine ink and installed it. Before even one page was printed, two of the 4 inks showed less than half full. The other two began showing low after only a few pages of mixed text and graphics. I think the design is just bad and nothing will make it better short of delivering ultra short-lived and ultra low priced cartridges that you install before you print and then pull after a week of use. They just don't last for any amount of time. Time seems to be the limiting factor, not page count when it comes to this product. The ink-jet business model seems to be: 1) Loss lead the printer with low capacity carts. 2) Sell far over-priced replacements carts to make the money back. 3) Blame suppliers of off-brand papers and inks for poor quality results. OTOH, The printer does an outstanding job of producing printed output when the over-priced "recommended" supplies are used. OTGH, The long-term and light use of this product in the home is likely to be cost prohibitive.

The replies from Brother to all the ink volume issues is canned and totally unhelpful. Why are so many complaining. The product must be defective and labelling misleading. Do you plan on fixing this?