Besides filling a Laser Printer cartridge with toner how long does an image drum last and how do you check it out?

Answer 1

Most laser printer drums, whether included in the toner cartridge or installed in the printer as a separate unit, will have a life of no fewer than 15,000 pages but some can be 50,000 or even 100,000 pages. It all depends on the service it is designed to expect. Most of the smaller, home-user type of laser printer will have drums that are less robust than those used in office environments.

However, if the drum is part of the toner cartridge and therefore gets replaced each time you put in a new cartridge, the life of the drum is of little concern. It should last much longer than the amount of toner that is in the cartridge. Exceptions would be if the drum surface is damaged in some fashion. For example, if someone tries to print labels inside a laser printer (something that is not recommended by any manufacturer!), some of the adhesive of the labels (or sometimes an entire label itself) will adhere to the drum and cause print quality issues such as certain repeating patterns, lines down the page, etc. In that case, the only thing to do is to replace the drum (which hopefully in that case is within the toner cartridge as that is most frequently cheaper to replace than a separate image drum).