Deskjet problems

[Bucket]

I have a HP DeskJet 940c. I'm currently having problems with my cartridges that I didn't have before.

After installing new cartridges(B&W and Color), I've noticed it isn't using the black cartridge to enforce the true black in the printout. As a result, what should be black comes out as a dark green/gray.

Looking on newsgroups has taught me that this particular printer uses colors even in greyscale printing, so it has to be set to 'draft' quality in order to use the black cartridge exclusively. Obviously I want these brochures to be better quality than that, and I also need the printer to print using both cartridges. I had it using both before, but for the life of me I can't remember what I did to make it stop doing that.

Since I'm making about 600 or so prints, I need to spend the least time possible playing around with the settings. Hopefully someone who's run across a similar problem can remember what they did to fix the problem...?

[Sephiroth]

dude if you make alot of prints i would seriously sudgest a laser jet. if you need B&W only a good lasre printer is fairly cheap. a color laser printer will be atleast $400, but will outlast an inkjet.

a standard balck & white laser printer can be very cheap. at work we got 1 now for $100. sometimes it is down to $75 due to mail in rebate. this is best buy, so i am sure you could find one even cheaper.on pricewatch.com that same modle is $84. the samsung ML-1710

also a laser printer will have far longer life. doing alot of sessions that involve printing 600+ pages will kill a inkjet rather quickly. we learned this in the reptile group.


i would sudgest a print shop. i bet it would be cheaper than buying ink. next to that invest in a good laser printer. yea they cost more but you get more.

[SYS]

My Deskjet 932c drove me mental. It'd screw up constantly and spew out characters of mindless bullshit instead of what I wanted it to print out. It would jump back and forth between actually functioning and spewing bulllshit. Thank god it hasn't been acting up lately.

[Sephiroth]

i still have a deskjet610CL it is shit. slow as shit and horrible. next thing i do get will be a laser printer. i print more text than anything else. infact i have not printed a photo in 3 years

[spank]

Sephiroth
God of Faulty Hardware

My DeskJet 850c works every once in a while. It also has that random character problem, though.

[SYS]

spank said:

My DeskJet 850c works every once in a while. It also has that random character problem, though.

If I get another printer, it definitely isn't going to be a hewlett packard. At first having gone from a dotmatrix printer to this deskjet I thought it was incredibly efficient. Then it would screw up like that randomly and keep spitting paper out till there's nothing left, and still ask for more. So annoying. Is it that hard to design a printer that prints everytime you tell it to print after setting it up properly?

[Bucket]

Sephiroth said:

i would sudgest a print shop. i bet it would be cheaper than buying ink. next to that invest in a good laser printer. yea they cost more but you get more.

Yeah, we looked into printshops... some of them were charging ten times what it would cost us to do. Sure, you get quality in return, but... we have to split the difference between a pro look and what is affordable(especially if we're printing out a brochure, letter, business card, and address sticker for each of 500 respondents).

Anyway, turns out we had laser paper instead of inkjet paper.

Heh.

[Zaldron]

A laser printer has you changing the cartridges AND the drum. Neither one of them is really cheap. Depending on the usage, you end up rebuying the goddamn thing every year.

And yeah, someone should tell HP how to write decent drivers. Incomplete PCL transfers do not mean you're supposed to print the memory, it means you should fucking stop.

[pritch]

Heh, coincidentally, am I the only person who actually prefers his printer to come through parallel rather than USB? I have WAY too many USB things on the go here.

XP's built-in driver for my 690C+ is way better than the original HP one on my old machine.

[Sephiroth]

pritch said:

Heh, coincidentally, am I the only person who actually prefers his printer to come through parallel rather than USB? I have WAY too many USB things on the go here.

XP's built-in driver for my 690C+ is way better than the original HP one on my old machine.

nope i prefer parallel. nothign else uses it and it saves me a USB port. i dont know if there is any real difference in quaility and speed between USB and parallel.

[SYS]

pritch said:

Heh, coincidentally, am I the only person who actually prefers his printer to come through parallel rather than USB? I have WAY too many USB things on the go here.

XP's built-in driver for my 690C+ is way better than the original HP one on my old machine.

Nope, mine goes through a parallel.. but my computer is pretty ghetto. Not like a 2mb of ram black and white Macintosh box ghetto, but you get the idea....

[Bucket]

Now I have a completely different problem. After hooking it up to another computer, the printer will now dump files as soon as they're done spooling. That is, it'll wind up while the file is being put to queue, and then it whirrs like it's spitting out a page, and then nothing.

Basically, it's doing everything except the actual printing process. Man, FUCK TECHNOLOGY.