Officejet 200 Vertical Alignment Issue

[fieldeffect]

I'm trying to use an Officejet 200 to print some two sided essentially playing card sized things with fronts and backs that need to align (doing the duplexing manually by feeding one sheet at a time, taking it out, flipping it, and putting it back in for the second print). Initially trying this with one card that is dead centred on the page.

The left/right alignment is perfect (holding the paper up to a light I can see that the borders are exactly aligned, but the top/bottom alignment is consistently exactly 1.5mm off (see attached photo). I'm trying to understand what is happening I've tried to print a rectangle that goes very close to the edges of the page and found that the front leading edge of that rectangle (i.e. the first edge that comes out of the printer) is there, but the back edge of the box is just missing, like the printer is either:

a) Not printing the very back edge of the print for some reason

or

b) It is feeding the paper out a little too far before it starts printing (so the back edge of the box that would be the last thing out of the printer is actually off the back of the sheet of paper, if that makes sense)

Is there anything I can do solve this? I understand that extreme accuracy is not going to be guaranteed/easy, but the fact is that the incorrect offset is exactly 100% consistent every time. The accuracy is great, it's just not printing in the correct place 🙂

I'm wishcasting that there's some way to tell the printer or the print driver to feed 1.5mm less paper before it starts printing. I *could* make all the stuff i'm printing offset on the page by the same amount (i.e. 0.75mm on each side), but that's a huge pain, especially in then readjusting it whenever I need to print on anything other than this printer.

Many thanks in advance for any advice.

[Valsimot]

If you print on a two sheets, 1st sheet for front and 2nd sheet for back and then check alignment.

[fieldeffect]

Ok, so if I feed the paper through with the same front edge in both passes (i.e. flipping the page along its long edge rather than short edge before re-inserting) then the vertical offset is in the same direction and the rectangles in the middle of my test page do perfectly align, but that makes the orientation of the second side upside down and back to front, so if there was real content on it that wouldn't work.

For some applications where I have a lot of control like Powerpoint, before I print I could vertically and horizontally flip every other page and get the result I need, but that's quite onerous and also not possible for all applications. I really need a way to do that rotation of every other page at the print driver level.

Given that I usually render everything to PDF before printing anyway, a solution that uses some PDF software to rotate every other page when/before printing would probably work, but a quick look around seems like that's considered an advanced editing feature, so I'd have to pay a hefty (considering that this is all I need it for) monthly subscription for a PDF editor to do that.