Printing is light and faded - only from mac

[JoeDMD]

My mac recently started printing light and faded.
My printer is an HP laserjet 5si w/postcript and network card.
I can print fine from my PC, everything from the mac is faded.
It makes no difference whether I print with the printer driver or through gimp-print. The result is the same.
I am running 10.4.11

Found someone with different printer, but the same problem on the apple forums, but no solution over there.

Thanks for your help.

 

[BlueRevolution]

Try opening /Applications/Utilities/ColorSync Utility.app. Click Devices, open Printers, then select your printer in the left-hand list. What does it say under Factory/Current Profile?

 

[JoeDMD]

Try opening /Applications/Utilities/ColorSync Utility.app. Click Devices, open Printers, then select your printer in the left-hand list. What does it say under Factory/Current Profile?

Unknown or remote profile.

 

[tallguy]

Did you just accidentally change to printer settings to fast draft? Look at your presets or the paper type/quality in the print menu.

 

[Consultant]

Check your printer settings.

Check your color calibration.

Most people who work in design use a Mac because the color reproduction works great if you set it up properly.

 

[JoeDMD]

Check your printer settings.

Check your color calibration.

Most people who work in design use a Mac because the color reproduction works great if you set it up properly.

Did you just accidentally change to printer settings to fast draft? Look at your presets or the paper type/quality in the print menu.

No settings were changed. As I said this is a recent problem, it affects all software printing on the mac, and does not affect my PC when printing to the same printer. The problem exists when printing through 2 different drivers (same thing happens when I print through gimp print) In effect this means that the problem would affect any printer I printed to.

The link for the apple forum discussion is here
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10646891#10646891

 

[paydirt1]

This problem just started for me. I'm on an iMac OS X Version 10.5.8.
Did anyone figure out the solution?

 

[paydirt1]

I had the same problem today. Mac wouldn't print black, PC would print black just fine on the same printer. I changed the black ink cartridge to a new one. Voila! Fixed it! The ink was below half full, maybe the postscript driver I use on the PC is more efficient...

 

[YSR50]

Old question but this just happened for us as well. Toner ran out and after changing to a new cartridge we were seeing faded printing only from the Mac side.

Just for future reference one thing to check is the on the 5si go to the Print Quality menu and make sure EconMode is set to Off. I think that when the toner is running low for a while it switches to On. Not sure why this doesn't seem to matter when printing from PCs

 

[Aarkay]

Mac printing HP Laserjet 5 is light / dim - change econo mode

I concur with other posts on this topic and my thanks to you.

On the (Laserjet 5) printer, go to config menu and make sure the setting is NOT econo mode.

For some reason, with this setting, it works on PC (windows 7).

 

[EEAndersen]

My mac recently started printing light and faded.
My printer is an HP laserjet 5si w/postcript and network card.
I can print fine from my PC, everything from the mac is faded.
It makes no difference whether I print with the printer driver or through gimp-print. The result is the same.
I am running 10.4.11

Found someone with different printer, but the same problem on the apple forums, but no solution over there.

Thanks for your help.

Shame on me. Same light print on two different printers, same Mac. I found an intensity/color setting in Pages in the Format sidebar for TEXT, next to a color wheel. Found the default black setting and we're "back in the black again." Don't recall changing it. Could have. Do I run with low ink? You bet. Could Pages sense a low ink situation and make some correction, possibly.