Brother color laser printing blue cast over page?

[DonS]

Hey all

Just had a client send me these pics. Two different images, one seems to be just black toner smear, in the other it appears to be printing a blue cast over the page. Not a big printer guy myself, so I was hoping to get some second opinions on what you all feel might be the cause.

Thanks as always.

 

[Markverhyden]

The first image looks like maybe fuser or toner cartridge since it looks like a repetitive defect. The second one is not clear enough. Either way color printers have whats call a transfer belt or some similar mechanism/part. It could be any number of things. First steps are to remove and re-seat all toner cartridges. Same with the fuser. But if it's one of those consumer level machines most likely trash and buy a new one. For many of those models you cannot buy new repair parts at any price.

 

[coffee]

When ever I have worked on laser printers most all issues point to the consumables. They would be the toner cartridges, Developer drum. I would cycle out the toner cartridges first. You can swap the developer drums around to see if one makes a difference. I have a MFC-9125cn that is atleast a year old but have not had to replace the belt unit. To me the first picture looks like a belt unit issue. However, Because your having issues with blue and black I would say cycle out the toner.

 

[DonS]

Thank you. I will check the toners first. The belt unit was apparently just replaced last month with a genuine Brother belt unit... So hopefully that is not source of the problems...

 

[Tom_Sand]

I work in a school that uses a lot of brother lasers, when we have issues like this we give the printer a full clean just to make sure, all the toner / drum units we have here have a little green tab on the left hand side, when you do a clean slide the tab across a couple of times, also you could try taking a soft cloth and gently wiping down the belt unit, What model is it, if we have one here I might be able to help more.

 

[mr m]

Good advice here. All you can do with cheap, consumer-grade lasers is to clean them or replace the toner/drum cartridge. I bought a brand new Brother laser on sale for less money than the cost of a new fusing unit!

It pays to fix the business class lasers because you can buy parts. They sell maintenance kits that replace the transfer rollers, pickup rollers, fuser etc. Follow the recommended replacement times and you'll minimize down time. I have an old HP 5si that I've been maintaining for over 10 years and it runs like a top.

Are these defects from 2 different printers?

Your second defect looks to be a cyan (blue) toner cartridge fault.

Like mark said your first defect is repetitive and usually points to the cartridge or fuser.

One industry trick to determine if the toner cartridge or fuser is at fault for repetitive defects is to print a test page and stop it before that page reaches the fuser. You do this by manually feeding a page, don't use the tray, and opening up the lid so the printer halts. It make take a few pages to get the timing right. Remove the cartridge and carefully remove the half-printed page and examine. Be careful. At this point the toner has not been melted by the fuser so it will easily smear. Toner is messy!

If the page has no defect you can assume the cartridge is ok and the fuser is at fault. If you see the defect it's usually the cartridge first and transfer second causing the issue.

The fuser gets hot, over 700 degrees F so be careful not to burn yourself.

There are other components that can be at fault but that is much rarer.

 

[coffee]

Those HP 5si printers sure are/were work horses! I have fixed many of those in my day. Replacing 2/3 input assemblies, Pickup rollers, Fuser kits...

 

[DonS]

These are both coming out of the same printer, which is a Brother MFC 9440CN.

 

[Markverhyden]

Here is the service manual to help you test and diagnose.

http://verhyden.org/owncloud/public.php?service=files&t=4ce53f8ec325d15da99afd49f4789cc0

 

[DonS]

Thank you for this, Mark. The client has two of these printers, as luck would have it, so it should be easy to swap some parts out to find out what the problem is.

 

[Markverhyden]

Thank you for this, Mark. The client has two of these printers, as luck would have it, so it should be easy to swap some parts out to find out what the problem is.

Your welcome. To be honest printers are not that difficult with proper documentation. And having a second of the same model makes it even easier to diagnose.

 

[Altster]

A quick addition to a possible fix - are you / your customer using "genuine replacement consumables" as in toner carts. for this printer? Many times it is the replacement (cheaper) consumables that cause problems.

 

[DonS]

As a follow up. It ended up needing a pretty solid cleaning. As for the shading/lines, we narrowed it down to the Yellow Cartridge with was genuine, but was defective and leaking from the bottom.