Desperate plea for help with my 4L!!

[Interactive]

Ok, a little dramatic subject, I admit. But I am so frustrated with this thing or the drivers causing the problem. I've had this printer for 8+ years and it's always been awesome. But ever since I upgraded to XP a couple of years ago, I've not been able to get the thing to print graphics properly. The graphics come out very pixely. Back in the days of Win 3.1/95/98, the printer settings pages included the option of printing graphics "Fine" or "Coarse". I'm currently getting the exact same results as when it used to be in coarse mode (which was the default). The current drivers provided by MS and HP simply do not have this control and I can't find a way to fix this.
It's driving me nuts because I'm trying to print USPS Priority Mail labels and the barcodes are coming out in VERY low resolution to the point where they probably can't be scanned.
So far I've tried the following things:
- Adjusted from rastor to vector graphics printing (no change)
- turned on and off every feature in settings (no change)
- attempted to find older non-supported drivers and loaded them (changes to driver, no change to results)
- tried printing from another PC (my laptop running XP Pro, no change)

I'm out of ideas and ready to throw this thing against the wall. Please save me and my printer with your solution. :-)

Thanks!

[ptjeff1]

These issues are very frustrating!! Text prints cleary right? If it does you can eliminate printer hardware or toner problems. Does it print clearly on Win 98 or 2000? Do all graphics file formats print fuzzy? Like you said, all you can do is try different drivers and software settings. Try downloading the latest drivers from HP and try them all for that printer. Also try some older drivers like the laserjet 4 (it might be the same as the 4L). If you have postscript in the printer try the postscript driver. You can buy postscript if you need it.

[Interactive]

Thanks for the reply. While I can no longer test with Win 98 or 2000 because I don't currently have any PC's with those OS's, I can tell you that when I had 98, everything worked fine.

I agree that there is nothing wrong with the printer because the test pages print beautifully with rich text and graphics in perfect blacks and perfect detail. It reminds me of how good this printer used to be!

One interesting note, I am able to print the FedEx shipping labels with no problem but USPS labels from the web won't work. The barcodes come out fuzzy like all of the other graphics. But for some reason, the FedEx graphics come out perfectly.

Does this give anyone new ideas? I've already tried every driver I know how to find and have tried HP's most current selections from their support site. If someone can point me towards something else, I'll try anything at this point.

[pelagikos]

I have exactly the same problem: XP + LJ 4L = coarse graphics

Tried pretty much every driver setting with no effect. Looks to me like the problem is between the driver and the OS (XP).

LJ 4L is not like LJ 4, and I do not believe postscript is available for LJ 4L.

If anyone fugures out a work-around this issue, drop me an email, I'd appreciate it very much.

Thanks!

[dekard]

I've got a 4l and I noticed this problem too.. it can be caused by 2 things, 1 the resolution your printing at is too low. 150 dpi, for example. Raising the resolution would do the trick.

You could be running out of memory in the printer. have you upgraded the ram in it yet? if not, you can try lowering the resolution to see if you have any improvements. Adding more ram is the permanant solution.

[Interactive]

Dekard: Thanks for the reply. However, I have the resolution set at 300 dpi. Also, I ge the same results even when I just print one small graphic so I don't think it's running out of memory. This unit reacts to memory problems clearly, it starts printing incomplete sheets.

Thanks for your ideas though..