1320c laser Color Printer's cyan prints purple!!!!!

Question

i took my 120c to a local printer repair shop with their free estimation. Anyway, after a while, their tech said my problem was the toner cartridge and some other container was empty and the printer is ready for me to pickup. Weird I told him since my status monitor said my CYAN was near the top and all other colors were being used. Anywa, I bought another Cyan cartridge. So, I decided to create a doc with a BLUE square. I printed about 10 pages but decided I need to print 30 pages since my 10 pages resulted with my 1st problem, CYAN prints purple and not BLUE!

Need help, has anyone else come across this and fixed it?

C.B.2. · Accepted Answer

A few days on and the problem with blue being purple is sorted but the red coming out orange was much worse, by now a bright vivid orange was produced from any red colours in any file. I also noted the purple (or Magenta as the test print) was not a vivid as it should be.

Looking at the CMYK values for the affected colours (i.e. Red = C0, M99, Y100, K0) and thinking about the original issue it was obviously the Magenta that was the issue. My thinking is that originally there was too much Magenta and now there wasn’t enough. So I repeated the clean out as described previously, but this time only for the Magenta path. Also instead of vacuuming I took the unit outside and gave it the toner feed tubes a good old fashioned blow, and the toner cartridge got a good prod down the front outlet followed by a good old shake. When I put the assembly back into the printer I carried out “Auto Colour Registration Adjustment” by going via Printer Status > Printer Settings> Printer Maintenance > Colour Registration Adjustments > Start Auto Correct - then clicked on 'Restart printer to apply new settings'.

After this was done I created an image in my photo editing software to produce a red image across an A4 sheet and printed out 5 copies (during which I could hear one of the toners being refreshed during a pause in the printer output), from this I could see a shift from print 1 as bright orange towards red speckles appearing on page 3 and more apparent on page 5. I printed another 5 sheets and the return to colour continued until sheet 5 of the second set was a good crimson red. Next I reprinted the colour wheel as attached to my previous post and it was perfect, Magenta now a bit deeper, blue still blue, red now red instead of orange and other colours as expected.

Conclusion:- Was an issue with path of Magenta toner, probably caused by either impurity in toner, or weakness in design of the path of delivery causing a delivery issue. (Latter probably kind of similar to the known issue of black coming out grey light in colour where printing 80+ sheets of black text makes the printer wake up to the fact it needs toner to get through, refreshes and start to print in jet black again)

Happy days, 1320C printer with only 10,000 pages on the clock sorted and donated to a friend, as I now have a brand new Dell C2660dn (mug?) to look forward to fixing in a couple of years time!

papresident · Answer

I had the same problem with my 1320c laser printer...this is how I fixed it....I aligned 3 squares, purple first, blue and then red....printed out 5 sheets, by the 4th sheet, printed hesitated and when the 5th printed all the colors were true.

avpowerstn · Answer

Hello    More Info is needed...'I aligned 3 squares' what squares, using what program or menu..??    Thank You    Jim

C.B.2. · Answer

I Know this is a fairly old thread but I'm wondering if anyone found a cause & solution to this issue. My 1320C has just started doing the same sort of thing and it's only done about 10,000 prints in total.

Every print now with anything darker in blue than basic Cyan was increasingly purple in colour so mid-blue or royal blue is purple and very dark blue is brownish, Red was also slightly affected in that most shades of red were orangey in colour. It should be noted that the machine was increasingly noisy during start-up or printing (dry squeaking or rubbing noise) and has been since not long after buying.

What I did so far was remove the toners and the PDH and the fuser unit. I then lightly brushed down the front of the machine with a fine paintbrush and vacuumed any dust etc. that was around. Next I took off the small gears for the developer units, took them out made sure they were clean before replacing and re-greasing the gears with Silicon grease. Lastly I cleaned the toner feeds and the fuser unit, applied a small amount of silicon grease to all the rest of the visible nylon gears at the front end of the machine, then put everything back together.

At first there was no difference on my test prints - overlaid CMYK circles which produces an image with Magenta, Cyan, Yellow from the main circle and Red. Black, Blue and Green on the overlapping parts. (see attachment). At first there was no difference, but after using the printer on and off for 1 day with maybe 20 prints, gradually the blue came back to being blue instead of purple... So far so good but now the red is still off where it is still a deep orange colour. The investigation continues.

Has anyone else been here? Did they find a good solution?

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1320c laser Color Printer's cyan prints purple!!!!!

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