A Color Page With No Black Print
by Steve Geishirt · Parts Now! · September 1, 2007 - page(s): 51-55
Recently, some customers contacted us with similar questions about the CLJ 4600. Both had CLJ 4600 printers that were spitting out blank pages or color pages without black (see Figure 1). A normal or correct printout is shown in Figure 2. We’ve seen color issues in other color units such as the CLJ 4500 series and the CLJ 5500. The CLJ 4500 would spit out multiple blank pages until the paper tray was empty. The CLJ 5500 would have degrading or incorrect colors. One was a mechanical failure with a defective ITB belt, and the other was a program code that was easily fixed with a Remote Firmware Upgrade (RFU).
Years ago the CLJ 4500 would occasionally have a problem with the e-clip of one of the intermediate transfer belt (ITB) arms, resulting in one side of the ITB dropping away from the image drum. When this happened color would not transfer across the gap on the one side, but the black toner did. This was due to the chemical makeup of the black toner, which was mono-component, while the color toner was chemical toner. The magnetic properties of the mono-component or magnetic black toner allowed the transfer to take place while the non-magnetic color toner could not.
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