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I've got a feeling that my laser printer's drum could be wearing out. I just printed a fully black page as a test, and this is the result:
Click here for high resolution
Note a small degree of horizontal banding as well as overall image "roughness". Is this patterning normal, or is the drum wearing out? Do I need to replace the drum? (I've printed less than 4000 pages on this drum unit.)
Edit: The printer is a Brother HL-2170W. It is nearly three years old and was purchased refurbished; the supplied drum unit has a specified yield of 10,800 pages. The drum was never replaced, and the toner cartridge has 70% of its life remaining. All supplies used in this printer are genuine Brother supplies. I've cleaned the OPC drum itself with minimal improvement, and I've cleaned the corona wire as well. Could the failure be related to the age of the drum unit?
Edit 2: Blank pages are clean and printouts are free of repeating extraneous marks.
To a certain extent this is an opinion driven question. When you are doing your normal work do you see drum related streaking? Is it obvious enough to bother you? Personally I print text 99% of the time simply for reference. If I can read it it is adequate so I would not replace it for this. – EBGreen – 2013-01-10T17:20:23.987
The image has been updated. – bwDraco – 2013-01-10T17:29:33.707
Well I definitely wouldn't replace that. – EBGreen – 2013-01-10T17:42:00.793
Does you laser printer have status information about the drum? Our Xerox Phaser 6360N has information about the number of pages certain parts (fuser, imaging unit, etc.) are supposed to be able to create, and it says how many have already been done. Maybe if you bought a cheap drum... – BenjiWiebe – 2013-01-10T17:55:06.657
This is the supplied drum. The drum is supposed to have about 7000 pages of life remaining. – bwDraco – 2013-01-10T18:21:31.823
I wouldn't want to say this is too localized--this can guide other users with laser printers concerned about the drum. – bwDraco – 2013-01-11T02:51:11.853
@EBGreen: Consider expanding upon your comments in an answer. – bwDraco – 2013-01-11T02:52:24.520
So, does your printer software count the number of prints (as I assume you're not taking a note manually :) )? If so, you could just use this information and the image you provided to send it back to Brother and get their comments/replacement! – Dave – 2013-01-11T09:20:23.813
@DragonLord, my comments are that it is a matter of opinion. This is not an answer that fits the intended purpose of superuser.com. That is why I kept them as comments instead of an answer. – EBGreen – 2013-01-11T15:08:49.220