Printing photos with inkjet printer creates stripy photos?
By boisson
@boisson (256)
Hong Kong
August 27, 2009 7:34am CST
I have an hp inkjet printer, and it's been fine with printing until several weeks ago, when it started printing coloured items with little darker coloured bars running down the photo :(
Anyone know a way to fix this? Ten points to... oh wait, this isn't yahoo-answers anymore :3
Thanks, all the same :3
2 responses
@owlwings (43915)
• Cambridge, England
27 Aug 09
If these darker stripes are running DOWN the page, it could be one of several things.
1) Dirty feed rollers. Rollers should be cleaned periodically according to instructions in the manual.
2) Mechanical failure such that the head is not moving on to the next position at certain points in its travel before firing another droplet of ink, resulting in two drops landing on the same spot. This may be incurable but the first thing I would try is cleaning the shiny metal bar that the heads travel on. With some HP printers this is fairly accessible, with others it involves partially dismantling the printer and is often best left to a service centre. The bar should NOT be lubricated. It is designed to work without lubrication. See the appropriate user manual or (if you can find one) the service manual. Try the HP website for your make of printer.
3) Software failure (corruption of the driver files) may also happen, though it would be unusual for the driver to still work. Try reinstalling the driver for your printer. It is usually necessary to uninstall the driver first and, preferably, to identify the files used and delete them manually before reinstalling (uninstalling does not usually delete the files.
@boisson (256)
• Hong Kong
27 Aug 09
Ah, my last printer had those stripes running down, and you're right, it was caused by rollers (:
Unfortunately, mine just seems to print the stripes sideways, making my photos look like a faulty television set :(
Thanks for commenting though (: I learnt something from that.
@owlwings (43915)
• Cambridge, England
27 Aug 09
OK. Sideways stripes are normally due to a faulty cartridge. Even new HP cartridges can do this. They are usually pale or missing a particular colour. Darker horizontal stripes would be most likely due to rollers slipping (clean the rollers) or to something mechanical - a broken cog tooth or a slipping/loose belt, perhaps, or even a fault in the hardware that prevents a feed from time to time. Don't forget that, especially in the highest quality modes, the paper must feed reliably in minute fractions of an inch under the head.
The software (printer drivers) create the commands that tell the printer things like the line spacing and how much ink of each colour to fire at the paper in each position ('dot', in layman's terms). The printer then takes those commands and is supposed to do as it's told. It works on a line-by-line basis, very much like a TV, and, depending on the actual number of dots the head can print at a time, will print several lines at once, advance the paper a fraction of an inch and 'interleave' the lines until that block is done, advance the paper by a larger fraction and do the next 'block' and so on.
If your stripes are irregular and generally in different places on successive prints but always appear regardless of what quality setting you use, then the most likely cause is slipping rollers and you need to clean the feed rollers. If they are regular and, perhaps, always appear in the same place in successive prints, then they are probably due to a firmware or hardware fault.
Apart from cleaning rollers and the transport bar, there is not a lot that one can do. Repairing the printer may be possible but it will need to go to an HP dealer and will, very likely, cost more than the price of a new printer (unless it's under warranty).
The short answer is that you probably need a new printer!
@randomarts09 (1405)
• Indonesia
9 Mar 13
yes, it happened to me also. It's very annoying I need to find the way how to fix this. My pictures have horizontal stripes in them. I can't make my craft project with this. This look awful.
