laser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP (01/15/86)
I am in need of some information to help me solve a major problem we seem to be encountering on our Apple Laser printers. It seems that after a short time say 5 to 10,000 pages most all of our lasers are experiencing a smudging of the print around the lower left side of the paper. The problem persists even after a thorough cleaning and a new toner cartridge. Has any one out there experienced these problems, and better yet has any one found a fix?
laser-lovers@ucbvax.berkeley.edu.UUCP (01/23/86)
I'd like to add my name to the growing list of people experiencing the smudging problem with the laserwriter. Ours developed the smudge after about 100 copies. A thorough cleaning seemed to help a little but when we changed to a new cartridge it got worse. Would anyone that knows how to fix this please submit a note to the newsgroup rather than replying directly to those reporting the problem. I get the impression that this is a common problem. David Fay AT&T Bell Labs ihnp4!ihexp!dafa
reid@GLACIER (Brian Reid) (01/24/86)
We have 4 LaserWriters in our office building and I have one at home. Collectively they have printed a quarter of a million pages, give or take. I have not seen this smudging problem on any of them, except once that went away after I cleaned off the gray rubber roller at the exit from the beast. I wonder if there is some kind of a random manufacturing defect in the Canon print engine that lies inside.
laser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP (01/25/86)
We have a new LaserWriter (under 100 pages printed) and have noticed some undesirable things about the print quality that seem to be unrelated to the "smudging" everyone else seems to be complaining about. We tried printing a 512 x 512 x 8 deep bitmap image, scaled to fill the lower-left 8 x 8 inch area of the page. It was fine except that there was a horizontal line across the entire page, almost exactly 3.5 inches from the bottom of the image. This shows up on another image as well. It's not a real "line" but rather it looks like a couple of scan lines are missing and the adjoining edges don't quite match. Curiously, the image area doesn't measure quite 8 x 8; it's more like 7.82 square. Is this considered good LaserWriter standards? I also had problems printing a 600 point Helvetica-Bold "A". Aside from the general "blacks aren't really black, especially for large solid areas" problem, it seems that the drum doesn't get cleaned properly. The whole letter has horizontal streaks. There is a big streak at (you guessed it) 3.5 inches from the bottom, and starting a little (0.15 inch) below that is another, lighter, image of the letter overlaid on the first one and displaced downward. Imagine a photographic negative of a big "A". Expose a print for 10 seconds then move the paper 3.65 inches and expose it for another 5. Develop normally and you will have what I'm getting. It's kind of hard to describe in words any better than that. It seems to me that when you print big solid black areas the drum doesn't get cleaned off properly. When it comes around again to pick up toner it still has toner/charge left on it from the last pass. Looking at the various innards of the LW, a drum circumference of 3.65 inches (just over 1/2 inch diameter) seems about right. If anybody has had similar troubles (and knows how to solve them) I would appreciate hearing from you. I'll be very unhappy if I end up having to take it back and let the dealer keep it for a month to fix it, or tell me there is nothing that can be done. Roy Smith <allegra!phri!roy> System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016