HP Deskjet 5550 printing blurred/misaligned text - misaligned colour cartridge?

[jlavery]

Hi all,
My Deskjet 5550, after several years of great service, has suddenly
started printing blurred text.

Looking closely, it appears that it is printing a very slightly
misaligned version of each letter - giving a blurred effect.

Printing using the black cartridge only seems to fix the problem,
indicating that the colour cartridge is out of alignment. The problem
occurred just after changing the colour cartridge, so there's
definitely a link there!

However, running the 'calibrate printer' procedure does not fix the
problem. Neither does removing and re-inserting the colour cartridge.

Anyone got any thoughts as to how to fix the problem??

Thanks,

James

 

[SteveB]

As far as I know, the 5550 (I've got one too) should use the black 56
cartridge only on text documents without you having to do anything to
manually select it, so I wonder if the problem is that the documents you are
choosing to print don't have black as the default font colour in your text
software. Or possibly your text is not really text at all (in the sense of
being a bunch of ASCII) but is an image, just as if it were a scanned text
that hasn't been OCR'd. Keep it simple and print from Notepad to check.

PS
My 2 yr old many times refilled 56 cartridge has just started giving fuzzy
edges unless I use 'Best'. Old age reaches us all.

 

[jlavery]

Hi Steve,
Thanks for the tips - will try them out.

James