Tip of the week: keep your printer’s laser clean
For a year we wondered why our Konica Minolta 2430DL produced vertical stripes. As we mostly printed regular, every-day office letters it did not mattered too much, as it was mostly visible in more saturated areas. We mostly waved it off as: it’s probably just the empty color toner (which was at 0% for many months, but still printing in principle).
Today, however, we wanted to print some invitations, and as the Xerox Phaser 8500 had it’s (usual) hick-ups with the custom page size we decided to go with the laser printer and started to get rid of the stripes by installing a new magenta toner, but no change. As we also had a new drum in the storage we replaced this in the hope to finally clear ths stripes, but still no go.
After some more back and forth and excessive googling (which was not too helpful anyway) we further searched for replaceable consumables but did not found any. This pointed us to further disassemble the printer and we indeed found places one can self-service and clean: Most particularly the laser!
And cleaning the laser it was: After we wiped off the laser segment under the drum cartridge the stripes where finally gone! We now wonder why it is not more prominently noted more often (in magazines and the net, but also the manual) that one is supposed to wipe of some hidden laser under some “attention: don’t touch - hot!” warning signs, …
So the new drum cartridge and magenta toner could be put back into the storage, the old consumable still producing solid colors, even with the color toner cartridges indicated with 0% for about a year, now.
However, in the end we still convinced the Xerox Phaser 8500 to print our custom paper as the colors where way superior. At least we finally know where the stripes came from, and can print stripe-less on the laser printer as well.
