HP Laserjet Pro M501 smudges appear in printed paper

[Budhi]

Dear all,

I am having trouble with smudges that appear on the left and right sides of the printed paper as shown image below (please note that I hide the computer name and user name).

The printer is HP Laserjet Pro M501 with cartridge 87A.

Within the installed driver I did not see any tools that were able to clean the smudges.

Is there any tutorial or troubleshoot that I can use to clean the printer head/roller/toner? Since the toner is relatively new.

Thank you.

[Repairatrooper]

That looks like a failed toner or a failed fuser. If you measure the distance between two repetitive marks you can tell exactly what is wrong. There should be a cleaning page routine you can run under print quality menu directly from the control panel. The computer installed drivers do not provide these types of utilities on laser printers.

[Budhi]

Dear @Repairtrooper

Thank you for your response. I have tried the way that you pointed out. There is Paper Clean under Service Menu on the printer's control panel. And I have done that. Unfortunately, the smudges still appear as seen below.

Please note the black that appears in the images at the edge of the paper is the blank from the scanner. Is there any way around fixing this?

Thank you

[James_Mathias]

Someone suggested to me that you submit a print job, i.e. test page, and then interrupt the printing halfway through (like when the paper first starts to appear) by opening the printer toner door.  Then gently pull the paper out, being extremely careful not to tear paper inside the printer.  The paper should have part of the print fused (melted and dry) and part not fused (powder that can be rubbed off).  If the smudges are on the entire page, then the toner is the likely suspect.  If the smudges are only on the fused part, then the fuser is likely the suspect.