Ever since I bought some replacement cartridges for my CLP-300, the same thing seemed to happen.
The printer works fine for a couple of dozen pages. Then all of a sudden the button turns red and there is nothing obviously wrong – no paper jam, plenty of paper, paper tray aligned just the way it was when it was printing, etc.
I figure it must have to do with one of the new cartridges, which were not Samsung but some off-brand (with no name) that comes in a blue box that I bought online. (It says it is made in Korea with Japanese toner powder.)
Today, I figure it out – I think – after weeks of pulling out the cartridges and putting them back in, turning the unit off to cool it down and even taking out the entire toner mechanism. This afternoon, I remove the L-shaped waste toner container and accidentally spill a whole mess of blue powder on the ground. Great. But then I immediately put it back and suddenly – NO MORE RED LIGHT! Hallelujah!
So my question is this: Is my replacement toner crappy and is it gumming up the imaging unit unnecessarily? Or have I been neglecting some part of the maintenance which says this unit needs to be cleaned in some way regularly?
This is a fairly new machine – I bought it at Office Depot as a floor model this summer (you don't want to know the price) and the original black toner is still working. The cyan used one off-brand of replacement toner that seemed to work fine; the magenta and yellow were the replacement toner I described above – and their arrival seemed to precipitate the problem.