Strange printing problem...

I'd greatly appreciate some help with a little troubleshooting.

I own a Samsung ML-1710 Laser printer. I like it a lot. It's inexpensive and it's small, so it's good for someone like me who doesn't print all that often.

I'm having a problem, which can be seen in the attatched image. When I was just printing normal documents, I couldn't quite see what it was doing, but I knew some of the text was lighter than the rest. So I tried printing out a large black square and got the following:


{the right side is the top edge of the page)

Any idea what's going on? There isn't any sort of toner save function enabled, and even if there was, I've tried turning it on and off and nothing seemed to change anyway.

Now that I look at some of the other documents, though, I don't think that the toner problem is limited to the area in those printings, because in other documents, it seems to be occuring all over the page, in random places. I can't figure out why it would be that way, then print three identical pages like the ones above.

Any ideas?

I would guess the toner cartridge is bad. That printer has an all in one toner cartridge so most of the parts that would cause this are in the toner cartridge.

Other things that could cause this are if some dust has gotten on the laser shield glass or in the laser unit.

Thanks. I guess I'll look for the least expensive replacement, and if that doesn't work, I'm not sure what I'll do...

You may also want to try removing the toner cartridge and shaking it, or rotating it back and forth. Sometimes you can get a few hundred more pages out of them by redistributing the toner powder inside the cartridge.

J

Yeah, shake it baby!

Hehe, actually, I've been shaking it before every print. It hasn't been working for me But at least I look like I'm doing a little dance in my swivel chair

Quote:
Hehe, actually, I've been shaking it before every print. It hasn't been working for me But at least I look like I'm doing a little dance in my swivel chair

Ah, well that explains why it's not working for you, then -- most of your shaking energy is being transfered into swivel energy, rather than toner-powder distribution energy. Try standing up when you do the shake.