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Printing Psychic Troubleshooting

“Dude, you people didn’t test the printer properly! It doesn’t print colour”

Lanier c2800 & c5000 colour photocopiers and printers We test printers, and let the customers know whether they are compatible with their network and applications.  It saves problems later, such as the Novell iPrint issues with HP UPD print drivers.  The positive side of our testing is that it’s rare that a customer will see a problem in the field, because we’re caught them in testing.

So I’ve only seen three problems reported in the last year:

  1. The Case Of The First Problem aka Postscript doesn’t work if you don’t have a Postscript printer.
  2. The colors I see on my screen are not the same as what prints out!
  3. Printer only prints greyscale

That’s this post!  Printer only prints greyscale.

Psychic debugging answer:

the print driver was not correctly loaded onto the print server.

How did I know?

  1. We tested, and passed that model printer as being fit for use.
  2. The printer setting was missing options, which the printer actually had (stapler and finisher unit), which leads to point three…
  3. The print driver was not loaded correctly on the print server, as the client desktop was missing some required print driver files.

you people didn’t test the printer properly

Guaranteed way to upset people, is to accuse them of not doing their job properly.

The boss said, “prove the psychic debugging diagnosis”.  So I did the following:

1. Confirm that the document printed correctly from

  • our test server to our test printer
  • our test server to the ““problem”” printer.

2. Copied the printer setup from the production print server to our test server
(using PrintMig for the curious)

3. Dumped the postscript print streams, to compare the differences.
Postscript file differences 
The differences are in RED.  Remembering that Postscript is a printer programming language, you are able to what the computer is telling the printer about how to print. 
The left display shows the printer not configured properly AND that it’s using a Grayscale color palette.

The fix?
Delete the print driver from the print server, and re-install it.
“Yes, this does mean you need to delete the four other printers which use this driver.”

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Related posts:

The printer does not print “Watermarks”. Printer jams The Case Of The First Problem

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