Archive for the ‘Print Quality Troubleshooting’ Category

When printing, either at home or in the office, occasionally you may notice a few dark or faded spots on the printed pages.  If this happens, there is no need to call the expensive technician- at least not before you try cleaning the rollers.  This is a common issue with printers that are used frequently, as normal wear and tear will eventually affect quality.  The problem is easily fixable by the average Joe, especially with an internet full of helpful tips, like this one.

Cleaning the rollers in the paper path:

Pull out the paper tray until it will not go any further, then lift it gently and remove it.  The rollers sit back behind the trays, so you will need to reach in the empty tray slot and grab the rollers.  Of course each is attached by a prong of sorts and will need to be taken off of it in the same fashion you would remove an empty toilet paper roll.

Make sure the cloth you use is clean and cotton, and dampen it with isopropyl alcohol.  Thoroughly and carefully wipe down each roller, removing dust and ink or toner particles that may have gathered.  Do not put the rollers back in until they are dry.  It is recommended to let them sit and dry out for a few hours, if not overnight.  Reattach each one to its prong, and make sure you here it snap into place.

Cleaning the feed rollers:

Be sure to unplug the printer for this one, as you will need to open the case of the machine, which can differ from model to model, so you may want to consult the manual.  Instead of removing the rollers, reach inside with the cloth doused in isopropyl alcohol and manually turn the rollers as you wipe the junk off them.  Let them dry for a while.

Once all of the rollers are dried and back in place, print a test page to make sure quality has been restored.

Laser printers use toner, which is a powder.  Inkjet printers use ink, which comes in liquid form.  Though toner has more of a tendency to spill or leak from the cartridge, ink can cause clogging in the print heads and nozzles as particles dry and gather over time.  All printers offer a cleaning cycle that should eliminate most issues, but occasionally this process is just not enough to unclog the nozzles.  Sometimes users can still print with a small clog, but quality will surely suffer.  Other times, the color that is jammed will not print at all. 

There is a simple cleaning you can do yourself that should wipe the problem right out.  All you need to have is a towel, some hot water and a small amount of isopropyl alcohol.

Remove the cartridge that is causing the problem.  Depending on the type of printer you have, the print head will be either on the cartridge or inside the printer. 

For models that have the print head in the printer, such as all Epson inkjets, after the cartridge is removed, put about 10 drops of the isopropyl alcohol in the receptacle area which has the hole that ink flows through.  Once you have done this, run the auto clean a couple more times then let the machine sit for a few hours.

If the print head is on the cartridge, soak it in hot water overnight.  Even soaking a towel in hot water and letting the cartridge lay on its side on the towel overnight should help loosed dried ink.  Use a dry towel to thoroughly dry the print head before putting it back in the printer, and run the auto clean cycle a couple times.  If still clogged, try soaking the print head in the isopropyl alcohol rather than hot water.

If none of this breaks down the clog, you might just want to buy a new cartridge or call a technician.

There is a wide range of color printers on the market that appeal to particular demographics.  For instance, there are high-volume color laser printers that are designed to meet the needs of a fast-paced office and there are slow personal inkjet color printers that belong in the home and can be used for photo printing.  Depending on the number of cartridges, the different colors of ink, and the internal color depth, varying resolutions and quality can be obtained.

The internal color depth is a basic system that defines the extent of color tones that can be reached by a printer.  This is measured in bits.  As the amount of bits increase, the clarity of prints also does.  A standard computer screen offers a total of 24 bits of resolution while early computing systems only featured 18 bits.

Only two colors can be achieved by a printer that uses only 1 bit, which is considered monochromatic and provides consumers with the option of having a black-and-white only printer.  Users that desire a high quality of color prints should find a machine that can deliver “truecolor”.  This is a method that uses 256 shades of blue, red and green, creating 16,777,216 internal color variations.  With this amount of color tones available, photographs and graphics will be vivid and nearly an exact match to an original image.  The “truecolor” technology is 24 bits, which on Mac computers is referred to as millions of colors.

For users looking to venture beyond the 24-bit depth chart, a separate video card will need to be added to the machine.  Adding one of these cards, a depth known as “Deep color” can be reached which holds literally billions of colors.  Though the video cards have been on the market since the late 90’s, it wasn’t until 2008 that Windows programs became conducive with 30 and 48 bits.

Scanning is the equivalent to the yesteryear filing system.  Cabinets and folders used to hold tons of official documents that office employees would have to sift through in the event of an old order or invoice resurfacing with a question mark.  With the integration of scanners into daily business lives, filing is as simple as scanning official documents and saving them into files on the computer.  They can be saved by date, by invoice number, or whichever way is the easiest to find in the future.

Because these documents are official, they need to be in good condition and be perfectly legible.  Sometimes, scanners experience quality issues that need to be addressed immediately.  There are technicians that specialize in fixing these machines, but there are also a few things users can check themselves before calling in the professionals.

For instance, if jams keep occurring when printing multi-page documents but there is never actually a piece of paper stuck inside the device, perhaps open the back panel and shine a light in there to see if perhaps just a corner of sheet or some other small object has gotten stuck and is causing the scanner to give this error.   It is also important to make sure the paper is aligned straight because when rollers pull documents in slightly sideways, it can cause the scanning surface to detect an error.

If the documents are scanning with black lines or other flaws, it can hinder the professionalism of the stored files.  There are lenses that actually read the information on the page.  It is important to make sure that these are cleaned.  A small spec of dirt or a piece of tape that came from a piece of paper can get on that lens and deface any document that is scanned until it is cleaned.

Remanufactured ink and toner cartridges are on the rise in popularity because they are economical and reliable.  OEM products offer the same quality and capacity while costing considerably more money.  In the old days, when cartridges were reused, it was via the ‘drill and fill’ method.  This involves simply drilling a hole in an empty cartridge and refilling it with ink or toner.  However, this technique seemed to disregard the condition of the actual cartridge, though, causing leaks and irreparable damage to printers.

Most vendors, whether it is the original manufacturer or third party suppliers have recycling programs.  Usually users will have to fill out a form on the website and the company will then issue a return tag the will be emailed to the person returning the empty cartridges.  Shipping does cost money and use thermal label paper, so to keep the focus on being economical, many programs will require multiple empty cartridges, as many as 8, before sending the tag. 

The truth of the matter is, recycling is something that everyone on the planet is eventually going to have to embrace.  The longer it takes, the worse the environment gets.  The majority of products in the world can be recycled, but ink and toner cartridges are 97% recyclable, which gives office environments perfect opportunities to join the ‘green’ movement.  Cartridges are 40% plastic, 40% metal and the remaining 20% is made up of foam, rubber, paper and toner or ink.

Millions of reusable cartridges are dumped into landfills or incinerated each year.  These can take up to 1,000 years to decompose, making them quite a burden for landfills.  In addition, 3 quarts of oil are used to make each cartridge, so just throwing them away after one use does not help the growing oil crisis in the world.  Recycling ink and toner cartridges is important and useful, as remanufactured cartridges are carefully inspected to ensure the same quality one would get from an OEM product and will save users between 30-50%.

Regardless of the quality of a printing machine, issues are bound to happen when you consider how many moving parts are used.  In addition, final prints are produced by using electrical charges, which sometimes can have flaws.  A common printing problem that users come across is something called ghost printing, or ghosting.  Basically, if you print a simple image and it looks like a faded replica has printed behind it, similar to the look of a stencil drawing, this is ghosting.

Paper has an electrical charge.  The lasers inside a machine also have an electrical charge and the two are attracted to each other.  So when the paper is pushed through, the laser imprints the design or lettering onto the page, and the toner has a charge that makes it stick to the impression.  Ghosting, simply, is when elements other than those charges decided to duplicate themselves onto the surface of the paper.

There are a few different places that this issue can stem from, thus a few different solutions to the problem.  If the printer you are using has previously used or overworked rollers in it, this may cause slips in quality and accuracy.  Perhaps purchasing new rollers or thoroughly cleaning the rollers you already have can eliminate this issue.  Keep in mind, however, that it is extremely important to use only the appropriate cleaning solutions.

Water tends to negatively affect the outcome, so be sure not to apply too much liquid to the area of the machine that you are printing, especially the rollers.  Balancing the damp solution is important to maintaining high quality results.  Be sure to adjust and inspect your rollers regularly using the instruction manual as a guide.  If the issue is not resolved and the rollers are in top form, perhaps it is the quality of the pigment in the ink or toner that is being used.

Tiled printing is when users produce a massively large project using a standard inkjet printer.  For instance, a large banner on the side of a building or a hallway wall is not one long piece of paper, yet multiple standard size pieces of paper that are printing separately then attached together.  Each tile or sheet will have a small portion of a large image, much like a puzzle.  The main program that is used to accomplish tiled projects is ‘The Rasterbator’.

The first thing that a user needs to do after loading the proper software is to find the desired image from the web or personal folders and download it to be converted into a jpeg image.  Once it has loaded, cropping and resizing options will be available.  Once you have selected the appropriate coordinates, the image will be sent to the server.  This will take up an abundance of memory, so be patient if you find yourself in a queue. 

Once all of the pieces to your picture have printed out, you can decide how to mount them or where to display it.  The separate tiles allow users to be creative with the final project.  Perhaps a few tiles should not be completely level with the others, or maybe only a few prints will be in color while the rest are black-and-white as to add emphasis on certain parts of the image.  The options are limitless, and the final product will add some pizzazz to a white bedroom wall or turn people’s heads whe they see it hanging from the old football stadium.

One of the largest tiled prints ever produced was by a small college in Massachusetts.  The final product was approximately 1,500 tiles, creating a record breaking tiled image.  Rasterbation is the most exciting form of printing since lettered banners that could be taped together.

In order to print, you need a couple of things working properly on your printer. One of the first things all buyers have to set up when they take their new HP printer out of the box is the printer driver. While many printers must use a specific driver to get up and running, there is an option out there called the Universal Printer Driver, or UPD.

When should you choose a Universal Printer Driver? Though they tend to work like a “one size fits all” product, that doesn’t mean it should be your first option—actually UPDs are the last option for most. Even if your product has a UPD listed, it may not be the best for your unit. Here are some situations in which an HP UPD is the right option.

• If printing in a mixed environment. This means if there are Windows operating systems and Mac operating systems operating with the same printer, you may want a UPD. If any mixture of operating systems is being used in conjunction with each other.
• If a basic driver wasn’t included upon purchase.
• If you are hoping to achieve compatibility with old versions of LaserJet printers.
• If printing intense graphics on Adobe is needed.
• IF printing on an enterprise environment to multiple printer models.
• If you want to upgrade your driver, but there are no updates available.

It is imperative that you only download a UPD if you are working on a machine that prints only. Multifunction machines and all in ones should not be used in conjunction with a UPD.

To download a UPD, go to Support and Drivers on HP’s website. Here you should find a list of printers, including yours. Follow the instructions, and if you have any questions or concerns on whether a UPD is right for you, call your manufacturer.

If you have a Lexmark printer, you know that there are a number of different errors that can happen here or there. One of the infamous errors is the 1203 error message that is primarily seen on the Lexmark 3300 series of all-in-one units.

What does this message mean? Generally you will see this error because a communication failure has occurred between one of the cartridge’s printheads and the machine itself. You may also see this error if there is a short in a printhead.

In order to fix this error, turn off the all-in-one machine and remove the power from the back of the unit. After about thirty seconds, put the power supply back into the machine and turn the multifunction device back on. If the error message goes away, try printing a test page. If the test page works, the error is resolved. If the test page doesn’t work or the error message returns, you will need to try a few more things.

Next, turn the unit off and remove the power cord again. Open up the top of the all in one, and gently move the cartridge to the middle of the machine. Take out both cartridges, close the top, put the power supply back in and turn the unit back on. If the message returns, you most likely will need to call Lexmark.

If the message does not return, power off the unit and remove the power from the back. Open the top, and move the cartridge carrier to the middle of the unit. Now insert the color cartridge and turn the machine back on. If the message returns, you need to clean your cartridge contacts. If you have cleaned them and it still returns, run a defective cartridge test.

Now do the same thing for the black cartridge. If the message comes back, you will need to follow the same procedures as before. If there is no message, print a test page and the error should be resolved.

No matter how excellent, all electronic devices experience trouble at some point—and HP scanners are no different. Though every HP scanner is different, HP has does have some general fixes for when your Photosmart scanner decides to quit working. These quick and easy fixes will work for scanners in the series, and they may also work for scanners with networking, as well as those that are e-scanners.

If you think the issue is software related, you need to uninstall and reinstall your HP scanning software. Go to “Add/Remove Programs”, which can be found on your desktop. A list of options should appear, and you need to click on “Uninstall”. Wait for the program to uninstall, then reinsert the scanner software that came with your HP scanner upon purchase. Follow the installation instructions. If you do not have the original CD, go onto the HP website.

Sometimes the scanner not operating properly has something to do with Windows. If that’s the case, the first thing you need to do is disable all start-up options in Windows. Then, go to “Run” and enter “MSCONFIG”. This will open up the system configuration window where you need to uncheck all programs in the “Selective Start-up” menu.

If your scanner isn’t working, but is making a strange mechanical noise, disconnect the machine from its power source for at least one minute and then reconnect all cables to the scanner and the power source. This should make the sound go away.

If  there’s a chance your scanner isn’t cooperating because its running with outdated software, install any updates your machine may be missing and try downloading a new driver from HP.

The last thing that can cause your scanner real problems is a dirty surface. To clean the glass, open the scanner up using a screwdriver. Once it’s open, use glass cleaner and a dry cloth to clean off dust and debris on both sides. Then reinstall.