Blank Pages when printing colour

[jimmy_2k]

Hi all,

 

I've got a bit of a baffling problem with colour printing. I have a series of Ricoh MPC8000 Printers running on PCL5c drivers using Papercut's FollowMe. The print server runs Server2008 R2 with both 32 and 64 bit drivers. The computers are running XP with Service Pack 3.

 

Students print using either word or MS Picture viewer. If they send colour prints either 1 full page print or 3 etc (basically in any order) Sometimes the colour printer will print these as expected, other times the MPC8000's will send out 1 blank page and stop printing. If you send these to a Lexmark b/w printer, these come out as expected each time. This has been a PITA to diagnose as i've spend a whole afternoon printing images without any issues and the next day some students randomly get this issue. We used to have an old 2003 Print server that was a mess so I rebuilt it to 2K8 with the latest PCL5c drivers (I used these as the other printers seem to work best with these)

 

The only other option I can consider is rebuilding the classroom machines from scratch but after justifying 1 days printing downtime to do the printer migration and the leased printing provider spending 2 days with me trying to diagnose the problem with this working each time I don't want much more egg on my face. Especially as these are exam print outs and the deadline is due!

[jamesfed]

Maybe an update to the firmware on the printers? Have seen similar things in the past where some documents just won’t print certain areas – most of the time transferring that document into a PDF/another format works fine so I assume it’s an application not talking to the driver issue.

[glennda]

I've had loads of problems with ricoh machines on 2008 - just about to get new ones with drivers so hopefully will be fixed then!

[jimmy_2k]

haha, these are leased devices and I had just as many issues with Server 2003. Firmware update is what I was thinking. I have logged into the printers and checked the error logs. It is coming up with memory overflow issues. The printers appear to have 1Gb RAM and the photos not getting though are 45mb in total so I thought that would work. This is a lovely random issue :-(

[ricki]

We have this with one of our oki b6250 and have been told that its a driver issue but they dont have an updates driver ready yet. lols

 

Richard

[Gibbo]

When this happens I usually print to CutePDF and then get Adobe Reader to print off. Works every time.