Erractic printing on my Samsung CLX-3185

Rick625 · ‎11-26-2019

Strange problem. For the last few weeks I have had an issue printing to my Samsung CLX-3185 laser printer. First let me say that just a week or so before I started having issues I replaced ALL toner cartridges so that should not be an issue. Second I am a retired university computer science instructor and where I used to print many times daily for the last few years I have found I may go a week or so and not print at all. So this printer is not used that often.

Now to the problem. When I print after not printing for a few hours it prints blank pages. If I go to Preferences and change any settings ( Best to Normal, Color to Black doesn't seem to matter just any change) it will then print VERY light and with a page that looks like the image unit is bad (gray bans on the print etc). If I reset from the on printer menu SOMETIMES it will give a clear print. If I unplug the unit for about 30 seconds then I will get a clear print. It will look like nothing was ever wrong.

I have downloaded and reinstalled the drivers. That also gave me a very clear image... until a few hours later...

I have not found anything that gives me any better result. Whatever I do after a few hours of not printing the issue starts again.

Any ideas?

Repairatrooper · ‎11-28-2019

Can you post a sample for me to look at?

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Rick625 · ‎11-29-2019

Not sure it will help but I have inserted 3 samples. One is an example of the blank print that occurred after hours of no printing. The second is after just changing a setting in Preferences. The third is after unplugging the printer for 30 seconds. Each is a print from printing the test page. The black dot you see on the right side of the first 2 prints is the result of something on the scanner that I removed before the 3rd print. I will say that USUALLY the second print has a bit of faded hard to read print. Maybe it did not show this time because I was using the Test page.

After adding them here I should point out that the images here are a bit faded compared to the actual prints (or the scanned images).

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