Laser printer tips
#Caring for your laser printer.
You would not let your car go for years without regular cleaning of the exterior and interior, as well as the obligatory trips to the service department of the dealer from whom you bought it, or to your local garage mechanic for a service and tune-up. However, many of you do not view your investment in your laser printer in the same light, neglecting to do anything to it until it starts to complain with strange noises or poor print quality. Not all laser printers are the same in terms of their service requirements, but in general terms, there are a few things which apply to all of them in terms of care. Top of page
Because most printers have a cooling fan in them, or, if not, are designed to allow air to flow through them for cooling, the airborne dust enters the machine and likes to stick to the plastic parts. Dust particles are attracted to parts which carry high voltages too, so not only do you get black (or coloured) toner inside your machine, you will accumulate a large amount of airborne dust as well. These will clog up filters, fan housings and fan blades, reducing the efficiency of the fan(s) and their cooling effect. At regular intervals you should clean the inside of your printer. If you still have the user manual which came with the machine, it will show you which are the critical areas to clean and what method you should use, e.g. brush, damp cloth, vacuum cleaner.
In the older machines which use corona wire technology (HP Laserjet, Laserjet II and III, Brother HL-8e and 10V, Apple laserwriter, Wang LDP-8, Star Laserprinter 8 and many others, care must be exercised when cleaning in this area. Cotton buds and clean brushes are called for in most of them. A damp cloth is usually all that is needed to clean the paper path area, but if you have major spills of toner, a good vacuum cleaner is required. Do NOT use any of the little portable cleaners as the filters are only designed to stop large particles and the toner will go straight through the machine and into the air.
Later machines use a transfer roller in lieu of the transfer corona and this is more robust. However, a damp cloth wiped over this component will likely as not give you print quality problems, so be careful. If you cannot find the manual, call us for information.
If your printer looks good, you will feel better about it than if it is covered with grubby fingerprints, felt tip pen scribblings, sticky "post-it" notes and messages or identifying numbers taped on with sticky tape. Clean the case with a good glass cleaning product sprayed onto a soft cloth, and remove the "pen" marks with methylated spirit or isopropyl alcohol - do NOT use hydrocarbon based solvents as they will permanently mark the plastic. Furniture polishes usually ensure that dust and grubby marks are enshrined on your machine forever so do NOT use these either.
Some older machines had Ozone filters fitted in them, based on activated carbon, and used to turn ozone into oxygen. These have a limited life and should be replaced regularly - your manual will tell you how often this should be but for heavy users it is usually around 30,000 pages or 6 months. Modern machines, because they do not employ corona technology have no need of these.
Some modern printers are fitted with air filters and again, these have a limited life and the user manual will tell you how often these should be changed.
These need to be divided into two areas;
1.. The printing consumables and
2. Machine parts.
Depending on your printer, it may have a single unit toner/drum cartridge, or it may have separate components, i.e. a drum unit and a developing/toner unit.
If your print quality deteriorates, you should first look to the print cartridge as the most likely culprit. Faint stripes in your print, unwanted lines, marks down the sides of your pages, grey background on every page you print, repetitions of previous text on the page may all point to print cartridge problems. In the case of the single unit cartridge, fitting a new cartridge usually clears the problem, but if it does not, you may have a problem with the printer hardware. Change your cartridge before you call the service technician. You may save yourself an expensive call-out fee.
If your printer has separate drum and toner/developer units (e.g. Kyocera, Brother, Panasonic, Toshiba) the answer is not quite as easy to arrive at. Your user manual will have several pages devoted to dealing with print quality problems and are a good guide to fixing the trouble without the need of a technician. Faint stripes down (across if you are printing landscape) your page may mean you are low on toner. Check the level of toner in the hopper. Grey backgrounding on your pages may mean that the developing roller has reached the end of its life, even though you may have plenty of toner. Black lines down your page may mean trouble with the drum unit, e.g. scratched drum surface, or it can be the developing unit. If you are having trouble and cannot resolve the cause, call your service technician, or call us for advice.
In either case, know your machine - read the manual and understand what it is capable of. Know also that when you change your print cartridge, or buy a new toner kit, you may also have to change a cleaning wand in the fusing assembly. Be sure to do this if it is supplied ,as the life of the fusing assembly can be considerably shortened by not doing this - and fusing assemblies are not cheap. Many of the new machines do not have or need a cleaning wand.
These are the parts which are in constant use during machine use and require replacement because of wear. These include paper pickup and feed rollers, transfer rollers, fusing assemblies and in the case of colour printers (these vary a bit), intermediate transfer belts and photoconductor drums. The replacement interval for these parts is specified in your user manual, and in the case of many modern machines, the printer itself will tell you how much life is left in the critical components (toner, fuser, OPC drum, transfer belt) and warn you when replacement is necessary. However, some components may not last the distance for a variety of reasons, some environmental and some because of usage pattern. A fuser may typically be specified to last 250,000 pages but may fail at half that because of some foreign matter which went in with the paper, or because someone used an inkjet printer overhead transparency sheet instead of a laser printer type, and it is now melted around the fusing roller or film. Messy and expensive. Paper feed rollers are usually changed at major service intervals, or when paper feed becomes unreliable, whichever comes first.
Some printers have a counter chip which is supplied with the new Photoconductor Drum unit and this keeps track of the number of pages printed by the drum, activating an alarm condition towards the end of drum life and stopping the printer when the designated page count is reached. This can be unfortunate as in many cases the drum may be capable of many more pages without degrading image performance.
Premature failure of any part can usually be traced back to improper use of the machine or careless handling of the printer or its consumables. For example, drum units may fail because an errant staple was flicked out of a document and went into the paper tray. Similarly, the same staple can cause failure of the fixing film in a modern printer. Foreign substances must never be allowed to enter the machine e.g. the ubuquitous "white out" can wreak havoc inside a laser printer at the fusing assembly because it is flammable.
Using a sheet of labels from which one or more have been removed is courting disaster as others are likely to adhere to the OPC drum or the fusing assembly. Raw glue edges are exposed when a label is removed from a sheet so partly used sheets should not be put through a laser printer.
Always ensure that you use transparencies which are designed for laser printer or photocopier use. Those used in inkjet printers and those which you sketch on with pens are NOT SUITABLE, they cannot withstand the temperature of the fusing assembly.
Most paper which is suitable for photocopiers is suitable for laser printers. Your printer manual will give you the specifications for the paper you should use. As a general rule, heavy stock or heavily embossed fancy papers are likely to give you toner adhesion problems - the print may seem to have voids in it, or the print may tend to rub off. Before investing in special paper for some project, test a sample of it carefully before you buy.
Recycled paper is generally suitable, although some types will generate more dust in your machine than others.
Pre-printed or letterhead paper needs to meet the specification for the printer. Some printing firms will ask you whether you will be printing on it with an inkjet or laser printer and will advise and select the ink types accordingly. Before ordering large quantities, get a sample run and test it thoroughly before committing yourself. There is nothing worse than having 10000 sheets of beautiful letterhead in the stationery cupboard if it is spoiled when put through your laser printer - and it wont improve your printer either.
Paper jams happen for a variety of reasons and may be caused by machine wear, operator carelessness, poor paper handling or storage, wrong type of media or just plain bad luck.
Keep paper in the manufacturers wrapper until it is needed. Don't open six reams and stack it on the filing cabinet ready for use. It will gather dust, change in moisture content, may collect foreign objects in the stack (like paper clips, staples, earwigs) and may get some corners bent.
DO read what is written on the wrapper with respect to which side to print first. This is very important if your machine is a duplexing printer (prints both sides of the page). Know how the paper is handled within the printer because some machines turn the paper over before printing on it. Very few have a straight through paper path, many of them have the paper follow an "S" shaped path so you may have to put the paper "upside down" in the paper cassette.
When you refill your printers paper cassette, do not overfill it. Break or fan the paper before loading the cassette and ensure that the paper guides or bails are set to hold the paper snugly so that it cannot skew. Close the paper cassette firmly but gently, don't slam it into the printer.
Does your paper jam in the same place each time? If it is in the input area, it may be due to worn pickup rollers or an obstruction. If it is inside the machine at the fusing assembly you may have a gear train fault, an obstruction at the fuser entry, or a toner build-up at the fuser entry which becomes sticky and catches the leading edge of the paper. If it is in the output or delivery area, you may have worn or hardened delivery rollers, or in some machines, bad clutch operation.
In removing paper after a jam, be gentle with your printer. If there are rollers holding the paper, see if there is a release lever or knob (often green in colour) to release the pressure and ease the paper out gently. As a general rule, remove the paper in the direction it was travelling in the printer. Pulling it out "backwards" may cause more problems than you are attempting to cure. If the paper is jammed in inaccessible places, e.g. in the fusing assembly, it is often cheaper to call your service technician than to try to get it out with your nail file, tweezers, screwdriver. If you can't get it out with your fingers, call the technician to remove it for you. Replacement fusing films, rollers or assemblies are quite expensive - we know, because we have to replace more than we would like.
Worn paper separation pads may cause the printer to take up more than one sheet of paper at a time. This is particularly so with the "toaster" format of many printers - you know, the ones where the paper goes in at the top and comes back out at the top. Many Canon and HP printers fall into this class. This is not a problem you can fix, this is a job for your serviceman and he needs to fit new parts into your printer. In a "clean" environment, this is likely to happen after around 25000 pages or in a very dusty environment it may happen after 10000 or less. The parts are cheap so the fix depends on your serviceman's rates.
This may occur for different reasons in different printers. In some cases it may be because the Photoconductor Drum is close to the end of its life. In others it is likely that there is a build-up of toner on the fusing roller in the fusing assembly, or in still others, it is a characteristic of the printers fuser. In this latter case, it is usually manifested as a problem when the printer is first turned on, or when it is woken up from its "power save" snooze. The HP laserjet 4 was a classic at this and the fix is as simple as being patient and allowing the printer to warm up thoroughly after turning it on, and setting the power save function out from 30 minutes to several hours (eg 4hrs).
#Print fade on one side of the page
Some printers are subject to this problem and it is caused by dust. If you are experiencing this problem, and your observations are that it is something which has become progressively worse over a period of time, and that it does not improve when the cartridge is changed, then it is likely you will need to call your serviceman.
There are some printer engines which give more trouble than others. Star LS-5, Xerox AP5 and AP10, Dataproducts Typhoon 8 and 16(Fuji-Xerox engines), a couple of Apple printer models using the same print engine as the Xerox AP5 are the worst offenders in our experience. The fix entails dismantling the printer and stripping the laser scanner unit down and cleaning the lenses and mirrors. The printer models indicated are not the only ones to suffer this problem, but they are the worst offenders. Sounds a bit awesome, but the fix is much cheaper than buying a new printer.
This page last updated on September 1, 2006