Is my printer faulty ?

[macman44]

I am having a color issue with my printer, and don't know whether the printer is at fault or if there is an adjustment I can make.   The printer is  a Color Laserjet Pro M454dw, is about a year old, and is now on its second set of genuine HP toner cartridges.

The symptoms I am  seeing:  Most colour printing seems to come out looking fine, but one type of image prints very differently than it appears on the screen.  This is an image of old-fashioned stone walls, which are predominantly grey but have a touch of other colours (e.g. green) in them.   Other images with a similar amount of gray do the same.  These images print much lighter than seen on the screen, and have an overall pinkish cast.  I have tried playing with the print density controls, but I really don't know what I am doing, and I still haven't managed to get rid of the pink.

My previous HP laser printer didn't have this problem, and always printed fine right out of the box.  I have compared identical prints with the two printers (on identical media), and the difference is quite marked.  (I no longer have the old printer, since it developed unresolvable mechanical problems).

I did a print quality report which gave me a page with 5 colour bands on, but I have no reference to compare these colours with so I don't know whether they are correct or not.

So, is there any method I can invoke to determine whether the printer has a fault?  Or is there any adjustment that can fix this issue?

I read the article given by this link, but cannot find the EasyColor prompts it references (macOS Monterey) so cannot work with the suggested adjustments.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_2857290-2886150-16

Any help would be much appreciated.    Thanks,

Paul.

[ShlomiL]

Hi,

Please follow below support document and check if that may help:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_3434839-3496633-16

Within the Troubleshoot color quality section follow Step one to Calibrate the printer to align the colors.

Next, Print a Print Quality Page as instructed on Step three and then Interpret the Print Quality Page as listed on Step four and compare it with the shown sample.

Shlomi

[macman44]

Thanks Shlomi.

I hadn't seen that document before, but had tried al the suggestions in it (not the Windows one, since I am macOS).  Printer auto-calibrates regularly, and my Print Quality page looks just like the diagram.  So it doesn't help much, and I don't know what to conclude.

Just so that you can see what I am up against, here is a sample (screenshots).  The first image is what I started with, and the second one is that image printed and then scanned back in.  While the color accuracy of the scan may not be 100% it's pretty close, and the overall pink tone is very clear and is what I can't find a way to get rid of.  This is the first time I have needed to print this kind of material, and ordinary non-critical printing has seemed fine up to now.

Are there any printer adjustments to correct this, or am I forced to conclude that the printer is faulty?   The printer is 2 years old so is likely out of warranty, and the nearest HP Service Centre is far away, so having it looked at unless absolutely necessary is something I would like to avoid.

Paul.

Original imagePrinted image scanned back in