New toner cartridges are 20% full and report themselves empty at 15%. What's going on?

We all knew inkjet printer cartridges were an outright scam, but sadly it seems that the makers of laser toner cartridges have some explaining to do as well. Lumafield scanned a new one and an "empty" one with an industrial CT machine and reports that the new one was sold 20% full and the "empty" one still had 15% in the tank.

What we found shocked us: not only was the empty one not really empty, but the full cartridge was far from full!

With the help of the automated measurements tool in Voyager—our browser-based industrial CT analysis software—we found that right out of the box, only about 20% of the space inside the cartridge reservoir is occupied by toner. A cartridge deemed "empty" by the printer has only slightly less toner, about 15%. That 5% range seems to represent the entire capacity of the cartridge. But what exactly is inside?

Scanning deadstock from the 1980s/1990s as a control, perhaps, might be in order.

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