Phaser 6010 Toner Region Woes

[intvsteve]

Well, my email exchange with support has been fruitless. I just want to know what part number I need for getting cartrdiges for Region 3 for a Phaser 6010.

I also want to know which geographical region is "Region 3"? Asia Pacific? Western Europe? Eastern Europe? It seems like this information is some closely guarded secret.

I'm rapidly approaching the point of just tossing a perfectly functional printer and getting something else to avoid this nonsense.

[intvsteve]

Thanks for the reply, Joe.

Is there a way to know what the numeric value for these regions is? The printer info sheet says "Region 3" but I haven't been able to map that number to one of those Xerox regions.

Based on this info, it must have been the case that the first replacement toner we got was from "region 3". Sadly, I have not been able to track down where that purchase was made. We've had the printer for four years.

[Joe Arseneau]

Devices are sold with a starter toner that have no region associated. The region comes from the first toner you put in.

This becomes an issue when people buy from 3rd parties who are not aware of this constraint, or travel with the printer.

So say you are in Scotland somewhere, and you discover that after all is said and done, it is XX amount of money cheaper to import a toner from the USA. But the USA toner will encode the machine for the NA/XE region, the machine will not at that point be able to use a toner sold in Europe.

The regions for a Xerox are :
NA/XE, DMO, FX and Metered

Xerox can convert a machine, but they don't for free of course, they have to send a person to reprogram it as neutral, then it will take on the region code of the next toner you put in it.

[intvsteve]

I've had a Phaser 6010 for some time and am generally happy with it. However, something happened w/ this printer and I have no idea how / when...

We used up the 'intro' toner and went through a couple other new toner sets with no issue. (Going from memory here - it's been a few years...)

At some point, we started having a lot of trouble getting toner cartridges that would work with the printer. It would just report "Incompatible Toner" or something similar. I've since learned that the printer is "Region 3". We bought it from newegg.com and ware completely unaware that there was region encoding for toner until this problem started happening. How did the region get set to 3? Where is region 3? Can you reset the region like you can for DVD / Blu-Ray drives? I assume "region 1" is USA?

This is immensely frustrating because this happened through no explict action that I can recall, and now it's become a long process to get toner because most sellers can't easily answer whether their toner works with "region 3".

Is there a "Factory Reset" option that just starts the printer and region fresh? The user manual doesn't seem to document this.

Thanks!