My ancient HP Laserjet 4600dn printer has worked well for many years. Several months ago, the main logic board in it died, which required sourcing a used component which was installed and brought it back to life. It prints a demo page from the internal firmware perfectly, and the test page generated by HPLIP also prints perfectly. It prints cleanly in monochrome, and is connected to the network by the JetDirect card in the printer.
The problem is that when it prints in color from any other application it creates a shadow effect, and this happens with both images and in printed font. This is a new problem, and it did not do this previously. It prints with the shadow effect from both Windows and Linux.
What I’ve Tried:
I’ve tried the PCL6 driver in both Windows and Linux, the universal HP print driver, as well as the generic PCL6 print driver through the CUPS interface. I’ve attempted to install it through the Ubuntu>Settings>Printers, as well as using the HPLIP app, and the behavior is the same in both instances.
It’s clearly a driver issue, but I’m starting to be dis-heartened about the amount of time and money I’ve spent attempting to fix this problem.
My kitchen table and desk are covered in failed print jobs, and any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks for checking out the post, and I hope everyone is having a nice Friday.
This forum can’t help you there I’m afraid. It could be one of HP’s dirty tricks they’re so fond of when a customer has the audacity to self-service their own devices.
>This forum can’t help you there I’m afraid. It could be one of HP’s dirty tricks they’re so fond of when a customer has the audacity to self-service their own devices.
This printer predates the notorious dirty tricks from HP. It is a driver issue, and I’m hoping that someone better at troubleshooting print issues is able to help me.
Hello and welcome to Ubuntu discourse. From the looks of it there may be no one that can help with this issue and it may be time to buy a new printer but you are welcome to wait and see if anyone has any ideas.
Take a close look at the color circle and the white lines. Those white lines shouldn´t be there - they should match the black lines.
To me, it looks like the image drums (is that the correct term?) aren’t aligned properly. Black alone seems to work, and color alone (without black) probably works too, but not the combination. It seems to be a hardware issue.
You probably find some help on hp pages and in manual. If it were my device, the first thing I would try is remove the image drums and reinsert them.
