Color faded after doing calibration and printing report

[parallon]

Hello.  I have a LaserJet MFP M281cdw printer.  I have been having issues lately of my color being really faded.  I print mostly in black and white, so I never really noticed.  I am using HP toner and they are all full.  My firmware is 20190706, and I don't want to upgrade due to the lockout ouf 3rd party toners.  😞  I have gone through the color calibration and printed the various reports, but when I send a photo, the color is terrible.  My parents have the same printer, and it prints fine, that is until I printed the reports on theirs to compare to mine, and possibly did the color calibration, and now theirs does the same thing.  I have tried doing a factory reset on mine to see if it would fix anything, but it didn't.  I would have thought it was an issue with my hardware until it did it to my parent's printer immediately after running the calibration and reports on theirs.  Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Mike

[Valsimot]

Print supplies status page from the printers report scan and post it here.

[parallon]

Thank you for your reply, and sorry for the delay.  After doing the factory reset, I lost my 'Scan to Email' settings, so I had to wait to do it at work today.  Also, I cannot find a way to include an attachment (.pdf), so had to do a screenshot of it and save it as a .jpg.

[Valsimot]

How old is the printer, and what is the printer's environment?

It's very likely you have a dirty laser optic that is causing faded print. The most common issue is the environment and buildup of fine dust in the laser optics mirrors, making the print faded. This happens with time, and comes sooner when the environmental air is more dusty.

[parallon]

I would say the printer is maybe 5-6 years old, and it has been in a home office the whole time.  How do you go about cleaning the laser optic?  Also, that wouldn't explain why my parent's printer did the same thing after doing the calibration and printing out the sample built-in color reports.  I haven't done the factory reset on theirs yet, as I was waiting to see the results on mine.  I have no idea how long my printer has been doing this, as I mostly print in black and white, but my parents print a lot of photos, so it was obvious immediately when the change occurred in theirs.

[Valsimot]

There is a lot of disassembly to reach laser unit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qGVV3iSECU 

[parallon]

What exactly does the Calibration process in the menu do?