Light or faint color text on black and white HP LaserJet
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Fixes to problems
The nearest printer to my desk is a HP LaserJet 4050 and whenever I print coloured text I find that the printer prints the colored text too light. At first I thought the problem might be because I am using Vista x64 (I still accuse x64 first but it’s rarely the problem!) and anyway my manager has the same issue and he isn’t using Vista.
It appears that the reason I experience the problem now and not before is because I am using Microsoft Office Word 2007 which uses color in it’s templates. I tried telling the printer driver to print color text as black but it still didn’t make any difference.
In the end I reverted to the HP Universal PCL5/e driver and now everything prints as I had expected. So if you have the same problem try downloading and using the PCL 5 driver from the HP website.
If like me you weren’t sure if you would miss anything by going back to PCL5 you can read more at Wikipedia PCL entry and also PCL 3 and PCL 5/6 Features and Differences from HP.
