OfficeJet 6500 prints a light gray/dull black and fuzzy text

[superlight]

Out of the box my OfficeJet 6500 prints a light black text and the text is not crisp. The Print Quality Diagnostic Report is perfect. I am printing from Excel and the "User Guide" PDF for the printer. I am also setting the print quality in the print dialog box at the highest setting. Does the printer have a draft setting that could be overriding the settings from the applications?

I also want to ad that I am printing from 2 different Apple computers or MACs and have the problems from both PCs. 

I first posted this under the All-In-One forum. I then found the MAC forum and reposted here. 

[Wi-Fi-Guy]

Is the fuzzy printing from all applications?  Is it just printing from Excel and PDF files from Preview?

[Seltaeb]

If I may add on here, my Officejet 6000 Wireless does the same thing. Text documents printed out from TextWrangler comes out medium gray. Photographs printed out through GraphicConverter look almost faded, the colors aren't as crisp as they should be, as if the contrast was fiddled with somehow. Like the original poster, the Print Quality Diagnostic Report produces crisp sharp blacks and vibrant MCY bands, so I know it's not the print heads or cartridges.

I'm using a two year old MacBook with 10.4.11 and I've fiddled with every setting I could think of... quality, color, ink volume, dry time, and my printouts still look like they've been bleached. If it helps, an AppleWorks text document printed out through a networked G3 iMac also produced gray text. Every sort of diagnostic page printed through the HP Printer Utility produced sharp colors and black text, but anything else does not.

[pk2kdd · Accepted solution]

I also have the OfficeJet 6500 and had the same problem.  The black text was printing using a mix of colored inks instead of the black ink, resulting in a grey, fuzzy text.   I finally found a solution.  In each application under Page Setup, there is an option called "Format for".  Mine had been set to "Any Printer".  I changed that to "Officejet 6500 E709n [830E4A]" and now it prints the black just fine.  I have a Mac running 10.4.11.  Hope this helps.

[Seltaeb]

Wow, that did it! I didn't even think to look under the Page Setup menus. I did that for my OfficeJet 6000 and it worked! Crisp black text and richly saturated color photos at last! Eternal thanks, pk2kdd! 

[rokano]

Thanks for this info!  I was getting gray text printouts when printing from Excel 2008 on my brand new Mac mini (OSX 10.6.2).  This only affected my existing spreadsheets and not newly created ones which all printed in crisp black.  My solution, however, was to do the opposite:  instead of selecting my specific printer (Canon PIXMA MP170) under the Page Setup "Format For" option, I selected "Any Printer" instead.  Weird, but it works for me.  Thanks again!

[rokano]

This is interesting... after further experimentation, I discovered that the problem is not the "Format For" option, but rather the "Paper Size" option directly below it.  For some reason, when opening my existing Excel spreadsheets in Excel 2008 on my Mac (they were originally created on a Windows 98 PC using Excel 2000), they are initially set to a paper size of "US Letter (borderless)" and this results in the gray text printouts, but when I change it to just plain "US Letter" it prints out in crisp black.  Changing the "Format For" option worked because it was also automatically changing the paper size to the default "US Letter".

Perhaps choosing borderless paper makes the printer think you are printing a photo of some kind, so it automatically prints in shades of gray?

[Wi-Fi-Guy]

Good observation.  I suspect "borderless" implies photo printing, in which case invokes a different set of rendering rules.

[laurelmu]

Hi,

I checked my page setup, and tried both HP6500 and the Officejet 6500 E7 10a-f, but still got light blue text, when it should be black. I also tried changing the paper size setting: same light blue result. Strangely enough, the best print quality I can get at the moment is on the Photo Paper setting. This results in a dark grey print, with clear letters. Certainly not optimum.

[SrZoe]

My scans turn out with a grey background, how can I correct this?