Samsung CLP-680 Laser Printer - Colour Misaligned

[steamship]

About 90% of things I print are B&W so not sure when this issue surfaced. Anything printed in colour has the yellow colour offset to the others by around 5-6mm. Looking at the demo page printed (the butterfly image), the 'Color Xpression' logo in the corner of the page (three offset boxes, one green, one red and one blue), it looks like it is only the yellow cartridge that is offset. I'm running Windows 11 and it doesn't matter what application I print from (Word, Excel or even Paint). Also tried an older Windows 10 and Windows 7 laptop. Changing the print driver within Windows has no effect.

 

The printer is using genuine Samsung toner cartridges and I'm using the very latest drivers downloaded from the HP site (who now support Samsung printers). Have tried various suggestions I've seen for other laser printers like removing cartridges, powering on, wait for error message, power off, insert cartridges, power on, go to Image Manager and run Auto Color Reg., but no success.

 

The printer has printed less than 3,000 pages and the toner cartridges are at 49% for the black and 69% for the colours, and I've only printed 254 pages in colour.

 

After some Googling, I managed to find out how to get into the Tech Menu and from there produced an ACR report, and that shows an odd value for the yellow cartridge in comparison to the other colours, 6 versus values in the 90s for the Y offset (first digit in Y-Offset line). Unfortunately, I can't find anything in the Tech Menu that will allow me to change those values.

 

 

I've also tried updating the printer firmware with older versions (as it used to work fine), but it won't accept them (probably intentional).

[Oaktech]

Can you do an auto reg, then an ACR, then another autoreg, then an ACR etc to see if the values change? I had an Oki do exactly what you're describing and it took running the registration process about 50 times before it all brought it back in line because the values changed so slowly!

[steamship]

Can you do an auto reg, then an ACR, then another autoreg, then an ACR etc to see if the values change?

I first raised this about two years ago on various other forums, so I'm going to have to find the instructions I had for getting access to the Tech Menu, but at the present moment, anything is worth a try to keep me occupied. I'll print off another ACR report as a reference point, and then run your process 10 times, and then print another one to see if it changes anything. If I can see the 6 value changing for the yellow colour, I'll continue running the process.

 

My router decided to die on Thursday, so I've been internetless since then. Spent 3.5 hours on the phone with the ISP over a period of 5 hours, and then finally agreed to send me a new one. I've even managed to plough through my mobile data, and have only about 0.5GB of data left until the end of the month. New router arrived yesterday afternoon (Monday), all plugged in, and I'm averaging a 'whopping' 3.3Mbps speed. Spent another 40 minutes on the phone with the ISP yesterday, and their reasoning was that it takes up to 24 hours for the router to 'sort itself out', and I have to wait until this afternoon before I can complain about it again. I literally can only have one tab open in my browser, and if the page is loaded with ads, like a lot of sites nowadays, it's pointless.

 

UPDATE: Managed to find the Samsung PDFs and went to have a go at it. Did an auto reg and printed the demo page, and the yellow is way off now. Previously, on the 'Color Xpression' logo, the yellow was about 5-6mm above where it should be. It is now about 10mm below where it should be. Oddly though, in the butterfly image, the yellow was below in both instances, going from about 5mm to 10mm now. I also can't get the printer to go into Tech Mode, and this is using the instructions specific to the CLP-680 (screenshot of PDF attached). I've tried it about a dozen times, with Eco mode off and on, and also varying the time between key presses, with no success, so can't do the ACR report.

 

 

UPDATE #2:

First things first. Finally got into the Tech Menu using the following sequence: Menu, #, 1, 9, 3, 4

In terms of the Auto Reg and ACR otpions, I ran them several times, and have attached the two page printout. All the figures for X-Offset, Y-Offset, Page Width and Skew remain constant, but the others vary, which I'm not even sure what they mean. Was hoping to see the Y-Offset change, which it didn't, so stopped for now.

 

Edited November 21, 2023 by steamship