Everything washed out and faded on M255dw

[ejdub]

After a vacation, I returned and found that the print quality on my M255dw had degraded significantly. First it was just the magenta appearing washed out. Over the last few weeks the rest of the colors and blacks have also faded. When it seemed like it was just the magenta, I replaced it (yes, with a genuine HP cartridge) and it made no difference.  I've run many, many cleaning pages and they don't seem to make any difference. All of my toners are showing in the 20-30% range, so they may be low, but it seems suspect that they all would go at the same time. Also, replacing the magenta made no difference.  I've also updated to the latest firmware. See supplies test page below. Before I drop $400+ on all new toners, I'm hoping someone with an eye for this stuff will see my print samples and be able to tell me what's going on. (note that the strange shadow on the scanned page isn't actually there, it's from scanning the page with my phone) 

And here's a better scan of just a black and white document:

[Repairatrooper]

complete lack of color may mean that the alienation drive has an issue. The alienation drive moves the color transfer rollers away from the belt to prevent wear when printing only black. Try removing all cartridges, restart the printer and then add the cartridges one at a time when prompted.

[ejdub]

Thanks for the reply. I did what you suggested and the print is still very faded. The Supplies Status page looks slightly better than before, but you can still see that Magenta and Yellow are gone entirely and the black printing is very washed out. What can I try next?

Any other suggestions?

[ejdub]

I did what you suggested and the print is still very faded. The Supplies Status page looks slightly better than before, but you can still see that Magenta and Yellow are gone entirely and the black printing is very washed out. There is not a complete lack of color, but again, everything is washed out including black. It just doesn't make sense that I would need to replace all 5 toners at once... Any other suggestions?

[ejdub]

@Repairatrooper 

After changing all the toner cartridges, the problem persists. Here is the printout of a color photo:

Here is the original:

Does anyone have any other troubleshooting suggestions or an idea of what might be wrong? Thank you. 

[Jay_G24]

Hi @ejdub,

Welcome to the HP Support Community

I'd like to help!

I understand you are facing print quality issue.

If you have already performed the steps from the document Fixing Poor Print Quality and the issue persists, it could be a hardware failure.

I've sent you a private message with further instructions to get this issue sorted.

• In order to access your private messages, click the private message icon on the upper right corner of your HP community profile, next to your profile Name or simply click on this link:  https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/notes/privatenotespage

Hope this helps! Keep me posted. 

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