Oki C612 problem

Hello,

I have a small stationery business and I decided last year to invest in an oki c612 printer. I was very excited, I bought it new and enjoyed the starter cartridges for about a month. I had the cyan on low toner and I had a black text only menu order. When I printed these, some dark "cloudy" lines appeared all over my menus. They were very noticeable on my slightly textured 220gsm card.
There was no such problem until then.

I searched the problem online and found that it might be a low toner issue. So I replaced all toner cartridges, but the problem remains.
I have to say that I bought compatible toner, which I now know that it might have not been such a good idea, I just did not have the money for all the original toners at once and some said that it's "fine" to purchase compatible toner especially if I don't print a lot of colored pages and I only need color here and there.

This happened last summer in June, in the meantime I had a baby and paused my business for a few months. I started to print again some things this January and noticed that the issue did improve a bit, but it's still noticeable and I have to print any order on 160gsm and up trough a professional printer. I found a forum link on this site and the OP states she/he used only original toner and had this happen on four(!) OKI printers. https://www.colorprintingforum.com/threads/oki-c9655-dirty-background-when-printing.16394/
I also read that it might be a humidity issue. I bought a dehumidifer but the "dirty" background is still there (prints the same from any of the two trays) on cardstock (anything thicker than 160gsm, regular 80gsm is fine).

I would invest in all four original toners if I knew the toner is to blame. But I don't want to make this investment which is almost $1000 and have the same problem. The printer is bought on some shady website from my country, they said that I have warranty through them and not through OKI, so I would need to ship the printer to them (which is about 60kg) to look at it, but if I used compatible toners the warranty does not apply. SOOO.. Since I live in a very small town I can't find anyone to help me locally, I spoke with someone who has printers for rent for businesses, but he told me the issue is the cardstock which is too thick. I use 250gsm cardstock and this printer can print on 250gsm cardstock trough the mptray. I used the same cardstock fron the beginning.

I would also look into other low budget printers but I am afraid this will happen again or other issues could appear since I don't know printers ) I only bought this oki because another stationery business recommended the straight path it has and the fact that it can print on 250gsm on this low entry price sold me on it.

Thank you for any response, I am a bit desperate to make this work again as it's so unconvenient to have everything printed elsewhere, especially with a small baby at home, I would love to be able to print my small orders from my home.

 

Man, your problem probably resides inside the drum unit.

It is possible that the compatible toner created the issue.

By using a compatible toner you use unknown source toner that is not 100% sure guaranteed to melt at the exact temperature on the sheet of paper.

The oki toner expecially is known for being a particular version of toner, is spheric.

Now, this means that you can't use compatible one? Nah, you can, however there are suppliers and suppliers.

Once you learn to refill your cartridges with compatible toner and source for a good supplier of standalone toner powder and learn how to deal with chips and so on you will be on the ok side.

However some possible issues would still be possible and less could happen with original one.

Basically if you use original toner inside a original drum and with the machine itself what it happens is that the toner is melted exaclty at the temperature the manifacturer decided, and the toner would be of the right purity.

Using a random one would mean that probably a different setting of temperature would be needed, so you will need to use a setting like cardstock or heavy 1, heavy 2, heavy 3 -> with that setting the driver basically tells the printer to raise the fuser temp to a predetermined value.

However you will have not the capability to tweak this setting finely, you will have just this steps proposed in the driver, hence who knows if the setting you choosed will be enough.

For what concerns the background noise... first of all try to determine if this noise can be rubbed away with an eraser or not, tl;dr understand if is melted powder or just powder, anyways put a page under a scanner and select a small portion, scan it at a insanely high resolution like 2400 or 4800 dpi and check if you are able to get what color make this noise.

Let's assume it's black, probably the black drum unit have some problems, could be that the otp drum charges too much and needs to be replaced or needs to be cleaned and so on.

If you replace the drum and raise the fuser temp by choosing a higher setting probably your print quality will improve.

I'm sorry to see btw that this forum is so few frequented by persons, would be nice if people would reply more sooner, the opening post is in march...