Strange printing problem

If there's one type of issue I hate to deal with more than any other, it's printer problems. I hate printers with a passion.

At the moment I have this client. Everything she's been trying to print has printed out blank. I've been remote controlling her computer and trying everything I could think of:

- deleted the printers, removed the drivers and port, then re-added the print drivers from the HP website (this is an HP Officejet 6500 E709a)
- tried printing from multiple sources: word prints blank, so does notepad, but Adobe reader prints fine. A test page prints only the Windows logo and nothing else, which is weird...
- renamed the Normal.dot file in case the template had been corrupted
- stopped/started the print spooler
- downloaded an MS tool for "cleaning" the print spooler, which basically just wipes everything out

I'm pretty sure I've written down everything I did. Did I miss anything? What could be happening here? I've been searching all morning to no avail...

Boy, am I glad I'm not in your shoes.

Have you tied plugging in a different printer to see if the problem is in the computer (by far the most likely) or the printer?

Have you tried printing from even more different sources? It seems like it prints graphics and not text. I know, it prints PDF (is that right? Adobe Reader = PDF?) but PDF seems to be more like graphic than text. Just a thought.

Please keep us updated, this is a fascinating problem.

tanstaafl.

Sounds like a problem with the inkjet where it's not using the black cartridge. Maybe the user didn't remove the protective tape, or in doing so, damaged the print head.

The windows test page printed the logo since it's color, but skipped the black text. PDF may be working because It's sending color commands to the printer even for the black parts (huge waste of ink).

A useful test is to bring in some other printers (HP and otherwise) and see if swapping the printers makes a difference.

Fonts. The problem is fonts. The things that are printing are graphics, fonts are not printing.

There is a chance that the other suggestion about the black printer cartridge is also the problem... if the windows logo print test is printing just the color parts of the logo and not the black parts.

But if Adobe Reader is printing fine, and it's printing black ink, then my guess is that Adobe Reader is rasterizing everything down to graphics and sending a graphic to the printer, whereas Word, Notepad, and PrinterTest are sending typed fonts.

So. Assuming that my guess about Fonts is correct, here are some possibilities:

- Fiddle with downloadable font settings in the printer driver.

- Some printer drivers have an option to rasterize everything and never use printer fonts.

- Printer has a malfunction preventing it from using its internal fonts or preventing it from being able to use downloadable fonts.

- Printer has been configured for PostScript mode and you don't have any PostScript fonts.

Something along the lines of the above. Those are all just wild guesses to get you started, but your problem description seems to indicate a font issue, so start there and keep digging.

Thanks for the tips guys. I have to do everything remotely today, but I'll be able to get out there tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm going to try printing things with black text and colored text, along with images of varying colors (including black).

PDFs did print out fine, but it's true that it could have been using just the color cartridges.

Windows font system. Can get messed up. Especially if too many fonts, or a dodgy/corrupt font file, have been installed.

Also make sure the Windows temp folders are not stuffed with crap.

Good luck. I also hate printer problems

If it is a font problem, what should I do about it?

So, I tried printing a Word document with fonts in black and other colors. I also included on the document a couple Word graphic shapes, as well as a quick little bmp I made in Paint with scribbles of different colors, including pure black.

In all cases, it was just the black that didn't show up. The colored font turned up just fine, so it doesn't seem to be the fonts that are the problem.

The client then tried replacing the black ink cartridge and the problem did not improve.

At this point I'm suspecting a printer failure. I'm not surprised, since HP printers these days are hunks of cheap plastic. God, I miss the Laserjet IIP. The client said the printer was printing fine yesterday or the day before, and she prints often, so it isn't an issue with the ink drying up or something...

I'll be dropping by her place tomorrow and trying to print to my HP H470 (yes, I hate that it's HP, but it's the most portable printer I could find).

I had one printer that allowed me (meaning, its drivers and related printer control panel)to disable the black cartridge and only let the color ones to be used. When I tried to disable the black cartridge, just out of curiosity, I had a similar problem as yours (black no being printed), even though I thought (and still think) it made little sense - I would expect the setting to cause black to be printed via the other colors rather than via the dedicated black cartridge, the option being needed when you're out of black ink; but instead I got no black at all. Or, I did not get the purpose of that specific setting.
Could this be your problem?
Admittedly, it was many years ago. It was na HP printer, but can't remember what model. Desktop, personal, inkjet, however.

Except...you said it printed PDF files, I assume in black.

Curiouser and curiouser.

tanstaafl.

I don't think it is. As Tom said:

Sometimes a color printer will create black out of the color cartridges. As Tom said, it's a huge waste of ink, but the printer manufacturer will probably claim it makes the printout look better (it also makes their bottom line look a lot better).

I haven't seen the results of those PDF printouts myself. I'm betting that if I did, they would look slightly lighter than they should be...

They could say that, but they'd be lying. You can't make a true black by mixing other colors, you can only make a sludge representation. Yeah, that's a technical term.

I was leaning toward the PostScript/PCL/language issue but Tony beat me to it. That said, Word shouldn't be using printer fonts either, so in the end, your driver is what should be set up for the specific language. The ink thing makes sense except for the fact you haven't noticed any errors or warnings.

I just installed a new printer here and I'm with you, they're my most hated computer peripheral. My needs are pretty utilitarian, so I jumped on another B&W Lexmark laser, E462dtn, to replace my old Optra Lxn+. The older printer died a few weeks ago, which was a blessing in disguise.

That's not quite what I meant, but I agree. I meant that they say mixing the colors into the black makes it look better. In this case, it's just that the black isn't there to be mixed into. What's left is merely gray-ish.


But I'm still curious as to why it would print text in color but not black. My current assumption is that the printer is simply broken, but in addition to connecting my printer up to her computer, I'll also be connecting my computer to her printer, so that should tell me a lot.


There's nothing that makes me cringe more when I receive a support call than something to do with printers. They're the lowest of the low. All my clients are amazed at how inexpensive they are, then complain about the ink cost. I can't stand how poor the quality has gotten on these things, and the software is even worse.

Even though it's the last thing they'd want to do, what I'd honestly like is for Apple to make a printer. Have they ever made one? The printer market really needs a product with Apple-level construction. I yearn for a model I can really recommend to my customers that doesn't come with the caveat of "well, it's cheap enough that it if breaks it won't be expensive to replace."

Currently, if one of my clients doesn't mind only printing in black and white, I highly recommend the Brother HL2270DW. It's $112, laserjet, wireless, AND has duplexing (which I've never seen in any laserjet in this price level). I set one up for my mother, and the Windows software was decently light, and it works great on the Mac as well (had to download the drivers, but it worked great after that). Best of all the replacement toner is inexpensive.

It's really common for newer hp inkjet printers to break wires in their ribbon cables, causing one of the colors to fail. It may be that.

Apple used to have printers and though they designed them, they didn't make the print engines. Apple branded printers were around for 20 years, from 1979 to 1999.

They got out of the market because margins were falling through the floor. And it's why I don't think you'd see one again.

Mixing colors with black: in industrial CMYK four-color printing, it's not uncommon to mix everything in with your black in order to get a darker black. The tradeoff is that if your registration is anything other than absolutely perfect, you get color halos around your letters. Newer printers, both at home and in industry, often use more than the traditional four CMYK colors and have their own proprietary software to do the color separations. You just dump RGB at them and let them sort it out.

Fubar printers: Once you can hook your other printer up, you'll be able to determine whether it's a driver issue, a font issue, etc. Assuming you're billing by the hour, it's likely effective to go buy a brand new printer, just in case, and not even bother debugging the old one.

Cheap-ass printers: I know we've had threads about this before. I've given up entirely on inkjets and now have a Brother all-in-one laser in my office (black & white, duplex, fast, cheap; would be perfect except the Brother software on my Mac insists on asking for A4 scans, no matter how many times I try to switch it to US Letter) and a Samsung color laser at home (also duplex, fast, pricier but will hopefully last a while). The only thing I can't do is make photo prints, and for that I use Costco and their glorious Noritsu photo printer that goes happily up to 12x18". I also have some nice 20x30" prints, mounted, that I did at Fotoflot.

Yeah, that's the funny thing. I used to work at a print shop and book publisher, so I've got some background on this. Here's how you usually handle black in four-color printing:

- If you have plain black text and line art, you simply use black ink for that part.

- If you have four-color-process graphics, it includes all four colors including black.

- If you have an area of solid black where you want it to be super saturated and dark, you mix in some of the C,M,Y colors into it, so that you get an even darker black than just black ink will provide. You'll even do tricks with chokes and spreads to make sure that a slight misregistration in the printing plates doesn't cause rainbows to bleed out of the black area. And even when you do mix some CMY into the K, you never do it at 100 percent saturation because that's going to oversoak your paper and plates and cause hickeys on your final output.

- You would not normally do plain black text by using all-four-CMYK-colors, because on the fine lines of text, you can't get the necessary control over chokes and spreads to hide registration problems. Plus, that would waste ink.

All of the above is, in professional printing, carefully controlled by the separations software with a billion little settings and various tricky stuff you can do. But on a consumer inkjet printer, it's done automatically by the printer driver and whatever app you're printing from.

What I believe to be happening here is that Adobe Reader is doing the Bad Thing of using all four inks, even for plain black. Possibly, it's doing it for the same reason I originally stated, that it's rasterizing the whole thing down to a single graphic and printing that, so the printer treats it like it was a single large CMYK graphic and thus uses all four inks. The other pieces of software are doing the right thing and sending the fonts and graphics to the printer separately.

Anyway, in the end, you don't have a software problem here, you've got a clogged or empty black ink cartridge. Have fun. :-)

Easy way to find out. Have the printer print out its built in self-test page.



http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01669504.pdf

Ah. Missed this one earlier.

Fault in the printer, then, or a fault in the connection between the printer and the ink cartridge. Once upon a time, HP printers used to include the inkjet nozzles along with the cartridges. Epson was the one brand, IIRC, that kept the inkjet nozzles on the printer itself and they always clogged, chronically. But HP used to always be OK if you replaced the cartridge. So unless they've changed the design, I'd say the printer is faulty rather than the cartridge or the ink nozzle.

Do Bitt's printer-self-test to be sure first, then recommend the client get a color laser.

My new HP printer has the heads in the printer rather than the cartridges. Which seems like a very backward step to me, especially for people like me who use their printers about 4 times a year...

It seems to vary by model. My parents bought an HP CMYK inkspitter of some sort recently. It came with 4 ink cartridges, and 2 replaceable print heads. Two colors merged to go through one print head.

Oh, that is so bad. I moved away from Epson specifically because of their poor head-in-printer design, and now HP is doing it too?!... So bad.
I still remember my very first inkjet printer, an Epson Stylus 800, B&W, which would use so much ink just to try (and fail most times) to unclog the printing head. What a nightmare. Eventually the head broke and I was asked 90% of the printer cost for a repair. Those must have been early/mid 90ies.

Okay, so there you go. Even though it's an HP printer, there's a chance that it might simply be a clogged nozzle on the black print head. Not sure about the specific model in this thread, but it's clearly a possibility.

Apple's Laserwriters were some of the most bulletproof printers ever. At my workplace just about every workgroup had one.
Discontinued in 88'. The last one I saw operating was about 2006. But I'll bet if I check the asset reports there will still be some listed.

Eventually it was problems feeding paper that killed them - the rollers having petrified.

Every time I turn this new printer on it thrashes away for several minutes, presumably squirting some of my expensive ink into a bucket somewhere inside in an effort to keep the heads clean.

Yet the Epson head is by the far the best- probably the most wasteful though. It's interesting to think about what a chemistry feat it is to design ink that mixes well, doesn't dry until getting on the paper, is relatively non-toxic and looks good. Inkjet printers do more then we give them credit for but it is questionable whether everyone should really own one. Unless your printing lots of photos the economics rarely add up.

Yeah, shame that none of the inkjet manufacturers have managed it, isn't it?

Tony, I think you confused Andy with me


I come bearing a summary of events after actually physically being in presence of the printer:

I connected her computer and mine to the old printer. I also connected both computers to my own portable printer. Her printer would not print black, mine would. Test pages sent directly from the printer its self would not print in black. Clearly the problem was with the printer, and it wasn't in the ink cartridges.

After a call to HP, they decided that the problem was with the ink carriage, which holds the ink cartridges and sends the signals for how much ink is needed and then passes it through. I'm not certain if it holds the print heads either, but I don't think so, I think those are further into the printer.

Anyway, HP eventually said that they didn't have that part anymore because they didn't make that printer anymore. The only thing they could offer was to replace the printer for half off the price of the new one. Of course, that's half off the highest list price they could muster, which was the same they sold it for in a local store, which didn't please my client any.

In the end I set her up with an Epson Workforce 840. It's a pretty darn nice printer, as inkjets go. In a field of universally-poor construction it seems pretty well made, and the software was surprisingly decent. The network scanning process ended up being extremely simple, and with a mere three button presses (directly on the printer) you could have a scanned document on the computer. I was very impressed. If I didn't refuse to buy inkjets, I'd strongly consider this one myself!

Anyway, thanks for all the help guys. It didn't end up being anything we could fix, but I still appreciate the input.

Hu.. I guess they have really improved. I have an Epson Workforce 500 and really hate it.

I’m constantly changing ink cartridges (well the wife is a rarely print) and it’s confusing to use. Way too many buttons.

Well, while I think you're going to get a great many buttons on any all-in-one printer, the WorkForce 840 might appeal to you. It has a a touchscreen surrounded by context-lit buttons. Any buttons you don't need for whatever's going on that moment are completely dark and you cant see them at all.

But mostly I'm a fan of the software install process and how it handles network scanning. While I think the software could be far better, it's still FAR better than everything else I've seen for a printer like this. And the network scanning, when set up properly, is dead simple. Once the software is installed on the computer, you can go directly to the printer, press scan, then either "Scan" or "Scan to PDF," and then you're presented with all the computers on the network it can see with the software installed. Once you press one of those computers you're done and you have a scanned file on your machine. Very impressive, IMO.

Again, I only wish it were laserjet. I don't want all the drawbacks of ink anymore. Unfortunately all-in-one laserjets are still pretty expensive, and I just don't want to trust some of the companies that make them anymore. I don't think I'll ever buy another HP printer again...

Ahh - my HP LJII still worked when I finally threw it out just after christmas. It was just too damn expensive and heavy.

It was excellent though, way better than the LJ5P, Deskjet and Epson all in one I have had since