Good quality drums for Brother color laser printers
If you’re not familiar with Brother printer toner, it actually comes in two parts. There’s a toner cartridge and a drum unit that are sold separately. This product is the drum unit.

The drum unit is that part that actually fuses the image to the page. The drum will last a lot longer than toner will. While it’s a little bit of hassle to change the drum and toner, over time it saves money; with brands like HP, their toners are generally more expensive because their drum comes built into the toner cartridge.

Installing it is pretty easy. The unit comes in a protective plastic bag, and then the drum roller is further protected by a paper secured with tape. When you peel the paper off, it exposes the part where you attach the toner to the drum, and it also exposes the drum itself, so be careful not to get fingerprints on the roller.

The printer recognized my toner and drum, although when you use off-brand toner you’ll get a warning message which you can just disregard. One thing I didn’t know until now is that there’s a setting in the printer that will track the lifespan of your drum unit as well. On my printer it can be accessed by holding down on the toner icon on the opening screen of the display unit until you see “Drum”, and then resetting it to 100%. Evidently the counter has nothing to do with any sensors on your drum itself; it just counts based on pages.

I’ve printed a few dozen pages and so far so good: no fading, streaking, ghosting, or repeating marks or spots, which are usually the signs of a poor quality drum. The print quality is nice and sharp, and from a basic visual inspection I don’t see why this wouldn’t go the full promised 20,000 pages.