Desktop printers have intricate arrangements of both consumable parts and moving elements that need to be replaced on a regular basis. You waste paper and supplies while waiting for the issue to be identified when your workplace printer prints pages with striped patterns across or along the sheets. The types of output faults you encounter and the kind of printer you use will determine where to focus your troubleshooting.
Inkjet Printhead
Inkjet printers work by forcing ink onto the page by heating or electrically currenting small nozzles. Your printhead may have gotten clogged nozzles if you notice voids in your output or horizontal lines across it. Your inkjet may need numerous head-cleaning cycles to remove dried ink because it does not well with downtime. Your printhead may need realigning if the output flaws interfere with the appearance of vertical lines on your page content. Both cleaning and realignment deplete some of the installed ink, particularly if your machinery needs extensive cleaning or repeated cycles of adjustment.
Laser Toner or Drum Cartridge
By transferring toner from a revolving drum onto paper and melting the toner with a heating element, laser printers produce an entire page of content at once. Either the drum is installed as a separate consumable or it is a component of the toner cartridge. In either scenario, output can have stripes or lines due to scratches on the photosensitive surface. In most cases, when you place a cartridge into a printer, a spring-loaded shutter that is present on the cartridge opens. You might be able to notice surface scratches if you take out the cartridge and carefully open the shutter without touching the drum or anything else inside the cartridge. Replace the cartridge and reprint the page of your document to rule out consumables as the cause of your issues.
Laser Fuser
A mixture of pulverised plastic and colouring chemicals makes up toner. Laser printers employ a heating component called a fuser to melt the toner as the paper passes through the rollers of the fuser in order to attach it to the paper. You may notice unexpected vertical lines on your output if toner cakes onto the fuser or if its rollers are broken. You might be able to locate a repetitive defect ruler published by the printer maker for your hardware model to diagnose lines that repeat. This document identifies the source of marks on the page based on where they are on the page in relation to the position of the rollers and other print mechanism parts. Some manufacturers restrict access to these service manuals to technicians.
Dirty Printer
Unbonded toner that gets inside a laser printer’s interior and ends up on its rollers or other moving elements may cause stripes, tracks, or lines to appear on your output. Each sheet has a characteristic “tire-mark” pattern along it that is created by several roller marks as the paper travels through the printer. These flaws need to be fixed in two steps. Finding the source of stray toner may reveal a leaking cartridge that gradually contaminates your device or an accident that happened when you tried to reproduce a page from a device that fuses at a lower temperature than your printer. Depending on your level of expertise and the layout of your printer, cleaning the device can necessitate a service call.
