The Mysterious Case of the Black Stripe

We have recently have had customers calling in with a very unusual printer problem in the HP P4014/P4015/P4515. They will intermittently get a black stripe going down the left side of the page.

The curious part about this was not that they were getting a black stripe, but when it happened. There was no real pattern to it, with some customers it was only in the morning, but not every morning. For some it was only in the afternoons. But in every case it happened very sporadically, some days it would be very intermittent printing a few bad pages then printing good pages. Other times it would happen almost all day, then on other days it would print perfectly all day long.

Very strange.

Then we realized that if the printer was near a window or had a very bright light shining on it, the image defect would appear. As it turns out, when light is shining through the fan 301 ventilation slots in the front left corner of the printer it exposed a small area of the imaging drum’s surface, and that is what is causing the mysterious black stripe to appear.

Simply moving the printer away from the light source, and in some cases just turning the printer away from the window, is all that is needed to solve this peculiar problem.

Compliments of “ImagingNow”