- Joined
- Feb 13, 2019
- Messages
- 10
It was working well, but then I had two consistent quality issues with pages printed:
1. small dots of Cyan down the page, but only with colour printing,
2. a generally slightly dirty light grey background to pages printed, neither being very pretty!
[This colour laser printer has 4 toner cartridges, each with a corresponding small drum/roller, paired for each colour C M Y and black. These transfer toner to a wider belt, from which the page is printed. Toner cartridges are relatively cheap to replace, but small drum/rollers and the belt are more expensive.]
So I switched the Cyan and Black small drum/rollers for other used ones (taken from similar printers), until I then achieved one very good quality Test Print page - Happy me! I should have stopped here. However as the toner cartridges were running low in all but one case, I replaced the toner (and possibly also the small drum/roller) with used ones, for each of the 3 low toners. [Sadly I omitted to make detailed notes on what exactly I did - Lazy me!]
I now see the two initial quality issues have returned, with the addition of a third:
3. a 2mm magenta stripe all the way down every printed page's extreme left margin.
I think that what I have found is that often a small drum/roller is contaminated with immoveable dots of solid colour, so that replacing this with another used but cleaner small drum/roller will, if I am lucky, remove these dots. [Dot patterns were sometimes repeated down the page, separated by the same distance as the roller's circumference?] Also that the wider belt was not, at least initially, contaminated. There may be other things going on, which I am not aware of.
I have two possible courses of action I might now take:
a) replace all toners, small drums/rollers, and the belt with the same taken from a similar but slower Brother HL-3140CW colour laser printer - this does not do double sided printing and has one toner cartridge low, and/or
b) install some of the 4 refilled toner cartridges which have just arrived.
Comments and advice please!
1. small dots of Cyan down the page, but only with colour printing,
2. a generally slightly dirty light grey background to pages printed, neither being very pretty!
[This colour laser printer has 4 toner cartridges, each with a corresponding small drum/roller, paired for each colour C M Y and black. These transfer toner to a wider belt, from which the page is printed. Toner cartridges are relatively cheap to replace, but small drum/rollers and the belt are more expensive.]
So I switched the Cyan and Black small drum/rollers for other used ones (taken from similar printers), until I then achieved one very good quality Test Print page - Happy me! I should have stopped here. However as the toner cartridges were running low in all but one case, I replaced the toner (and possibly also the small drum/roller) with used ones, for each of the 3 low toners. [Sadly I omitted to make detailed notes on what exactly I did - Lazy me!]
I now see the two initial quality issues have returned, with the addition of a third:
3. a 2mm magenta stripe all the way down every printed page's extreme left margin.
I think that what I have found is that often a small drum/roller is contaminated with immoveable dots of solid colour, so that replacing this with another used but cleaner small drum/roller will, if I am lucky, remove these dots. [Dot patterns were sometimes repeated down the page, separated by the same distance as the roller's circumference?] Also that the wider belt was not, at least initially, contaminated. There may be other things going on, which I am not aware of.
I have two possible courses of action I might now take:
a) replace all toners, small drums/rollers, and the belt with the same taken from a similar but slower Brother HL-3140CW colour laser printer - this does not do double sided printing and has one toner cartridge low, and/or
b) install some of the 4 refilled toner cartridges which have just arrived.
Comments and advice please!
