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964 printer quality poor
I have a new Dell 964 all-in-one printer and it has never printed very well. I have cleaned the cartridges several times and that looks somewhat reasonable (not great though) but still doesn't help my printing problem. The main problem is the stripes in colors. For instance, in draft mode, if I print out the word DELL from the logo, it should come out as a somewhat dark blue according to what is showing on the screen. What I get is astripe of light blue top followed by a very light pink middle stripe, followed by another light blue bottom. The stripes are about 0.15 inches wide and the logo is roughly a half inch high. If I print in photo quality, it is certainly better but not what I would call photo quality at all and when I do try to print at photo quality, it guzzles ink like crazy.
When I print just black text in draft mode, the quality is at least tolerable. It is not NEARLY as good as my HP printer in draft mode but it is much faster so I can accept the lower quality.
When I print just black text in draft mode, the quality is at least tolerable. It is not NEARLY as good as my HP printer in draft mode but it is much faster so I can accept the lower quality.
Printboy007
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Posted January 31st, 2006 23:00
It sounds as if you may have a defective color cartridge. If you are adjusting your quality up to 'photo' and are still seeing the lines, this is definitely not normal behavior for the 964.william_the_sco
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Posted February 1st, 2006 02:00
Your 964 should be printing much better than that. My 922 prints black and white typed pages almost the quality of my laser printer at work. And I print beautiful 8 x 10 color photos. Part of the problem may be poor ink cart alignment. Try printing an alignment page.
Also color logos, photos, graphs, etc. won't print well on regular printing paper, especially in draft mode. Photo, graph, or brochure paper work much better.- OK, I tried that and it looks pretty much the same as the example. Then I printed the Test page from that same option page and it looks horrible. If you look at the colored band in the middle of the page, the black, yellow and red look exactly right. The blue band on the far left site has the pink stripe at the top and bottom and poorly colored blue strip in the middle. All of the images at the top and bottom are visible but the pink and blue strip pattern destroys the images.
I don't know much about printers but this doesn't seem like a printer cartridge problem to me if 3 of the 4 colors are fine? What do you think? Printboy007
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Posted February 1st, 2006 03:00
"I don't know much about printers but this doesn't seem like a printer cartridge problem to me if 3 of the 4 colors are fine? What do you think? "Actually, this is usually indicative of an ink cartridge related issue. Assuming you haven't been printing tons of blue images, it appears as if some of your blue (cyan) nozzles aren't firing properly in the print head. You can actually check this by looking at the bottom portion of the test page which can be printed from inside the ' maintenance' menu from the front op panel of your 964. There should be three grid-like boxes at the bottom of the page, one is red, one is blue, the third is yellow. If you see many of the grid marks are missing or appear to be cut out of the blue box, you have found your problem. Let us know how it all works out...Printboy007
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Posted February 1st, 2006 04:00
No problem. Glad it worked out for you. Now send that defective color cartridge back for a free replacement! ;)
VBFan
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Posted January 31st, 2006 23:00
I do have another cartridge that I bought with the printer. If it is a bad cartridge, how do I get a refund?