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I'm working on a Dell 2150cn color laser printer. It is only about two years old but the one year factory warranty has expired.
Symptom: When printing a page the paper comes out covered in dry toner powder. There isn't even a semblance of the image or text that should appear, just a fairly even random coating of powder (think white noise). This happens even when printing a report page directly from the printer so it's definitely a hardware problem. The printer doesn't report any errors.
What I've tried: I logged into the printer's web interface and reset everything to defaults and tried all the cleaning options under printer maintenance. No change in behavior.
What should I try next?
The troubleshooting scenarios relating to print quality in the manual suggest replacing the print head device/imaging drum.
I'm leaning towards replacing the fuser instead since nothing is sticking to the page at all but I don't have much experience working on laser printers so I'm asking here!
Lucifer Sam
Posted 2013-11-15T17:03:36.350
Reputation: 67
Sounds to me like you have more of a problem than the fuser... There should be a fairly well-formed image on the paper even if the fuser isn't working. I'd guess there's a problem with the controller electronics since both the laser/belt stage and the fuser stage aren't working. – BobT – 2013-11-15T17:10:36.670
@BobT Thanks for that info. If there are multiple things wrong it might be cheaper to just replace the entire printer. – Lucifer Sam – 2013-11-15T17:28:31.090
Something to be considered... HP has some relatively cheap color printers (selling at almost the cost of the cartridges). – BobT – 2013-11-15T22:38:42.200