Ricoh AP3800C Very Light Printing

[Photovor]

Thanks for all the help so far with this troubled printer.

The current issue at hand is with the overall lightness of the prints. Before, the black was printing very light, and I replaced the developer unit, and that fixed most of the brightness issues with the black print, however, the overall brightness is still very light while printing regular copy.

If I run a full color print on heavy paper, in the heavy paper mode, out of the bypass tray, it is still very light, where before the printing had a very nice color and sheen.

Searching through the service manual, I saw some references about Gamma Adj., however in the service mode 1, I do not have that option.

Any suggestions?

[Cipher]

You can actually adjust the image density for each colour from the user menu (under maintenance).

You may also want to take a look at enabling 'auto TD adjust'.

The dev units are fairly small and image density can suffer on longer print runs.
When auto TD adjust is enabled the machine can be set to self adjust toner density at certain times such as intitial power up, job end or at a set printing interrupt interval.

[devil_121]

Just curious if anyone else has run into light printing issues with HP printers under Linux. I'm using Ubuntu and my HP 1012 prints very lightly with images almost washed out they're so light. I've tried playing with resolution and darkness settings, none seem to help. I've seen someone else post on linuxprinting.org that they had the problem with another brand of HP, but nobody ever replied to it. Hope there is a solution to it as output quality is very poor.

[Tonerbomb]

Also try forced toner refresh or OPC refresh from SM. A worn trans belt can also be a cause, if the belt is getting a translucent or whiteish look and not clear it's time. As for thick paper... how thick and what they call paper makes all the differance.