HP Color LaserJet M452dn Insists on Printing to Tray 1

[csupp43]

We have installed a HP Color LaserJet M452dn as a network printer in my company.  One of our systems prints to the printer directly, bypassing Windows.  Whenever it sends a print job, the printer always complains that there is no paper in Tray 1 and does not print.  Tray 1 is the manual feed tray, which is always empty.  When the user presses the OK button, the printer then prints from Tray 2.  (There are only 2 trays.)

The goal is to get the printer to always use Tray 2, unless there is something in Tray 1.  This is not an issue with any of the other printers we use as network printers, but this one is refusing to do so.

With other HP printers, we were able to get this to work by setting the TRAY BEHAVIOR options; namely setting USE REQUESTED TRAY to "FIRST" and MANUAL FEED PROMPT to "UNLESS LOADED" (or something similar), along with setting AUTO CONTINUE to "ON".  I have set AUTO CONTINUE to "ON" but I cannot find the other settings or anything similar, and every configuration I have tried has failed.  Does anyone have any suggestions?

[John_Getzke]

This is a driver configuration issue.

If your system prints directly to the printer then it is either using its own hosted print driver or the default print driver loaded onto the M452dn.  You will need to do some research to verify how your system is generating print jobs first.

With some of our legacy mainframe print jobs we create a custom print queue that is preconfigured on a print server for that purpose.  That way any jobs sent to the queue are handled in a certain way, seperate from the normal user print jobs.  These generally do not cause us much of a problem other than when the print driver needs to be updated from time to time.

Other legacy print jobs do not allow us to talk to pre configured print queues.  They must be configured to print directly to the printer via IP.  In this case the legacy printing application must referance a print driver somewhere to generate the job.  We use HP Universal Print Drivers and provide our developers with some context and print job instructions.  They plug those parameters into the system so that jobs generated and sent to the printer the correct way.  Once of those print instructions happens to be for printer tray.  It sounds like that is what you may be attempting to do.

You will need to uncover more information about how your system generates and sends its print jobs to the printer.  If its possible to modify that behavior in some way then we can assist you with looking up the corresponding print commands to do so.  But you need to understand how that component works before you start working on the printer.  They might have some documentation on the subject as others likely have asked the same questions.

I recommend you contact your system vendor or support contacts for more information.  Ask for specifics on sending print jobs, what is necessary, how does it work, can you modify the behavior and how.  Then we can start to review the options on the M452 to see if there is any way to accomplish that task.

[csupp43]

I appreciate the reply.

I have already contacted our system administrator for the system in question and he could not get the trays to behave correctly despite several attempts.  He reports he has exhausted all the options available, so your perfectly reasonable solution is not an option at the moment.  I was hoping that I could manage the problem through the printer itself so as to workaround this roadblock. 

Does anyone have a hardware based solution I can try?  Or is this printer model unable to accomodate this issue?

[csupp43 · Accepted solution]

I have managed to solve my own problem, which I will detail here.

I connected to the printer through the web interface.  On the SYSTEM / PAGE SETUP tab there is a section for the PAPER OUT ACTION.  It was set to the WAIT FOREVER option.  I changed it to the SPECIFY TIME AND ACTION option, set the PAPER OUT TIME to "0" seconds, and set the PAPER OUT ACTION to "OVERRIDE".  Now if Tray 1 is empty - which it always is - the print job automatically goes to Tray 2.  I also have the AUTO CONTINUE option set to "ON" on the SYSTEM / SYSTEM SETUP tab, though I am not sure if that is necessary or not.  (Given how much time it took to figure out how to fix it, I am not chancing on breaking it again.)

I hope someone finds this helpful.

[John_Getzke]

Great feedback, thanks for sharing the solution with us!

I learned something today : )