Problem with Brother bw laser—large black areas on printout

[cre8tive1]

Hi,

I have a brother MFC-8840DN connected to my all Mac network. Recently the printer has started outputting black areas across the entire page. Sometimes they are evening spaced from top to bottom. Other times nearly the entire page is black.

While I'm no technical expert. I'm thinking that the drum unit may be wearing out. The Admin page that I can log into via an IP address for the printer indicates the drum is good for 30,000 prints and I'm at around 28K.

I've attached a sample of what the print outs look like. Another point of note is that if I power off the printer and let everything cool off completely, then turn it back on and print immediately, the first few pages print with no problem. After the printer has been on for about 5 minutes the problem returns. So I'm concerned that it could be an issue with the fuser, not the drum.

Any thoughts or advise are greatly appreciated.

 

[nanofrog]

Try printing a number of blank pages, and see what happens. If they print what you've been seeing, going from darkest first to lighter on subsequent pages, then the fuser is contaminated.

If the output is consistent, it could be either the drum, or the transfer roller. (Foam roller that touches the drum. A missing spring under the roller can cause output like this).

Good Luck.