Frequently Asked Questions

Where does this family's price ladder bottom out?

Here. Five GPR-31BK cartridges at $385.63 work out to about $77.13 a cartridge — against $91.92 for the single — and the per-page cost reaches roughly 0.21 cents, the lowest in the GPR-31 family. Bought one at a time, five singles would cost $459.60, so the 5-pack saves $73.97. That is the full extent of the ladder: there is no 10-pack above this rung, and no further discount hiding beyond it.

What does 180,000 pages of shelf stock actually commit us to?

It commits you to the volume being real. At 10,000 pages a month — a genuine production pace — this pack is about eighteen months of black toner, a sensible horizon. At 3,000 pages a month it is five years of stock, which is not sensible: machines get replaced, departments reorganize, and toner bought for a machine you no longer run is money on a shelf. The 5-pack rewards high volume; it punishes optimistic guessing. Buy the rung your page counter justifies.

Is this pack really for one machine, or for several?

Either, and the several-machine case is often the strongest one. Every imageRUNNER in the GPR-31 family takes the same GPR-31BK cartridge, so a central store holding this pack can feed a whole floor or department from one stock line: one cartridge issued at a time, the rest sealed in the cupboard. It also simplifies the buying — one product to reorder, one price to track, no per-machine toner variants to confuse.

How is stock this size kept in order?

With a simple issue-and-rotate discipline. Boxes stored flat, sealed, in a cool dry place; the oldest box always issued first; a line on a stock sheet — or just the arrival month written on each box — recording what came in and what went out. Five cartridges is enough stock that informal memory stops being reliable, and enough value on the shelf that a two-minute system is worth having.

Does a cartridge lose anything by waiting a year or more on the shelf?

Kept sealed in its bag, in reasonable conditions, very little — compatible toner cartridges are built to wait. The practical watch-outs are storage conditions, not the calendar: heat, damp and direct sunlight are what degrade a cartridge, so a cool dry cupboard does more for the fifth cartridge than any use-by anxiety. Rotating stock so no single cartridge waits the longest is the other half of the answer.

What if a cartridge from the back of the shelf underperforms?

It is covered the same as the first one out of the box: a 1-year warranty and 1-year free returns apply to every cartridge we sell, individually. The faulty cartridge goes back at no cost, and because this is a 5-pack, the machine never waits on the outcome — the next cartridge goes in and the run continues. Full terms are on our shipping and returns page.

About This Canon GPR-31 Black Toner 5 Pack

Five compatible Canon GPR-31 black cartridges (GPR-31BK), 36,000 pages each — 180,000 pages at about $77.13 a cartridge and roughly 0.21 cents a page, the deepest rung of the GPR-31 ladder, for the imageRUNNER machines built around this family. Orders ship from our warehouses in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Georgia and California, and our support team answers Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM CST. Smaller rungs and the wider range are in our Canon toner range.

This black 5 pack is built for the ImageRunner Advance C5240, ImageRunner C5030, ImageRunner C5035, ImageRunner Advance C5030, ImageRunner Advance C5035, ImageRunner Advance C5235, and ImageRunner Advance C5235A. The rest of the GPR-31 family: the black cartridge (GPR-31BK), the GPR-31 black 3 pack, and the GPR-31 4-cartridge set.