My Samsung CLP-680 laser printer is producing messy colour prints, the B&W prints are OK. There's lots of toner around the cyan cartridge, others seem clean. A test print looks OK but has a few small white spots. When a photograph is printed there's a repeating speckled blue line (every 20mm, or so) down the page and some yellow streaking. All cartridge toner levels are 50% or above. I think that, because the black print is perfect, the fuser and other gubbins are OK, but I'm reluctant to spend £120-160 on a set of cartridges if there might be another problem. What does the panel think?
Hence my use of the word usually. However, the savings are such that having to replace the odd dodgy cartridge still works out cheaper in the long run.
I spent ages trying to get the right colours on my printouts. Eventually found it was a "compatible" cartridge problem. I've also had a "compatible" ink jet refil completely gum up the printhead. Oh, and yes, I've had a leaking refill one too.
+1 On mine it's always the magenta that leaks, but at £30 for a set of 4 cartridges it's not worth faffing with too much, just buy a set from another brand and change the magenta, hoping the one in the new set doesn't leak.
I find that my HP Colour LJ MFP 283FDW gives excellent colour prints of photographs - as good as the Epson inkjet (not sure of model) which it replaced on the grounds that the running costs of the inkjet were horrendous because the ink dried up after as little as a week of not printing anything, and cleaning the head used up most of a colour cartridge.
I'd always understood that laser printers were reputed to be poorer than inkjets for photographs (*), but that is not the case for ours.
And that's with bog standard default settings - nothing tweaked - whether from dedicated photo software such as Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro, or from MW Word (with a photo embedded into a document).
Somewhere I've still got the program I wrote back in the mid 1980s for printing B&W photos on a very early HPLJ which could only print B&W text or single-pixel dots. I found a book which gave the half-tone dot patterns (clusters of single pixels that increased in size as the photo dot got darker) so I generated the relevant HP control codes to output each half-tone dot in the photo. This is essentially what the firmware/driver on a modern printer does automatically, but I had to do it manually on a dumb printer. The only person in the department who had a laser printer was the boss's secretary, so I had to blag the use of her PC and printer, and used a .ras file from the set that was provided with Sun workstations as the source for my "printer driver".
(*) And I've seen some truly awful photos from earlier laser printers.
I imagine the same problem exists with inkjet printers and cheap clone cartridge inks.
I'm not too bothered whether colours on screen match colours on the printed page and match real life, as long as all of them look *plausible*. Some computer and TV screens, and a lot of cheaper inkjets and lasers crush the highlights so you get blank, featureless areas of highly saturated colour (eg orange, Trump-like flesh tones) because one or two of the colours have maxed-out - that's implausible and very obvious. If UKIP purple or colours of well-known objects like certain postage stamps are close but not spot-on, that's a far easier sin to forgive.
With actual printer inks, you can go for various Pantones and get absolutely reliable colorus at the expense of not many of them.
With a CMYK printer you are relying on the response of the human eye to be fooled into thinking a certain combination of those colours is the real thing. It isn't, and if the toner pigments are the wrong colour to start with, certain colours are well nigh impossible to produce.
I get pretty reasonable photo reproduction out of my cheap third party toners, because the eye forgives natural colours seen in a multiplicity of lighting, but pure artwork tones often just look wrong.
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