Which ink/toner does the Brother MFC-L2730DW use?

The Brother MFC-L2730DW uses the same two toners as the rest of that generation of Brother mono lasers, the TN-730 and the TN-760, and the same DR-730 drum. Choosing a cartridge for it is a question of size rather than of model, so any listing that says it fits the L2730DW almost certainly fits its single function siblings too.

The size you pick changes the running cost considerably. The TN-760 brings the cost of a printed page down to about 2.83 cents, from the 4.58 cents you pay running the TN-730, a difference of roughly 38 percent that comes from the 3000 page rating against 1200. The buy price is the other way round, $84.99 against $54.99, so the TN-730 only makes sense on a machine that prints occasionally and might be replaced before the toner runs out.

This is a multifunction, so it prints incoming faxes and copies without anyone watching the toner level, and that is the situation the low toner warning exists for. Brother's warning is deliberately early and the printer keeps going afterwards. The machine also has a continue mode that lets it print past the toner end of life reading, which is useful with third party cartridges whose chips report a level the printer does not fully trust. Brother imposes no firmware lockout on this model, so compatible and remanufactured toner works, and the non genuine message it may show does not stop printing.

Two faults on this line get blamed on the toner when they belong elsewhere. A cartridge that reports empty immediately after a refill has an unreset counter rather than an ink problem, and our guide on resetting a Brother toner counter covers the button sequence for it. Repeating marks down the page, on the other hand, come from the drum, which is a separate part with a much longer life than the toner sitting inside it. Streaks across the scanned or copied output only, with clean prints from the computer, are dirt on the scanner glass or the narrow strip the document feeder scans through.