Common Printer Issues:
Printers are notorious for causing problems, especially when there needed most. We would like to get rid of paper, and its apparent that steps to do this are being taken, but we are still far off from a paper free world. What people don’t realize is that some of the problems printers encounter can easily be fixed and are fairly common.
Perhaps the most common problem faced during a print operation is that the printer is too slow. This can be easily fixed by reducing the print quality for day to day print operations, and adjusting it back to normal on the occasion. If the printer queue piles up with failed or paused jobs, that too will drastically slow down the entire print operation. It is good practice to clear all printer jobs if a print fails or remains paused unnecessarily. Along the same lines, another common issue with printers is when the print job is sent to the wrong printers. This is a very easy fix and can be done under print settings in mac or windows, selecting a printer and setting it as the default.
The next major issue is guaranteed to be encountered by printers at least once in their lifetime, the cost of ink/toner. Its almost as if new printers are meant to be disposable; the printer costs less than the toner or ink replacements that work with it. This is a major business technique thats employed by almost every printer manufacturer in the industry. To save on printing costs there are two solutions that people can use, buy third party ink/toner, or buy high yield cartridges. Buying third party can save on a lot of money, but in newer printers third party cartridges may not be a possibility. New printers are beginning to check for authentic cartridges and in some cases users may even void their warrantees by using these third party options. The next solution is buying high yield cartridges; This may cost much more initially, but will pay off in the long run. The third solution is refilling old cartridges, again this may only apply to certain types of cartridges and isn’t an all round solution. Also you must make sure where you get the cartridges refilled from, it can be a messy procedure and if its not done right, can result in many more issues down the road.
Speaking of messy procedures, a clogged print head can cause a whole world of trouble. Aside from causing the print to be too light, too spotty, or causing horizontal lines, the print head can warp print jobs and result in unsaturated colors. The usual cause for the clogging is dried ink build up from previous print jobs. Again, this is an easy fix as most operating systems have utilities built into the print tools to clean the print head. If the utility doesn’t work, you may have to manually clean the print head or have it cleaned by a professional. When you have the printer opened up, it may also be a good idea to have a look at each ink nozzle and make sure they too are clean. Printers are also infamous for their unreliable out-of-ink messages, and a simple hack can pull out more prints then the printer thinks its capable of. For example, you can reset the ink cartridges, clean the contact points, and try a whole slew of options suggested by many people; all it takes is a quick google search or diving into a printers forum.