A Mind Lost

My problems with printers over the years have regularly been documented on this blog.  Huge, fussy printer drivers and strange operation seem to plague some printers.

At the office we have a Konica Minolta Magicolor 5450 which we use to print small-run sales literature.  Ever since we had it it has been a complete lemon.  During it’s 12 month warranty, it had a new fuser unit and two complete replacement main PCBs.  It has had every firmware and driver upgrade applied and still suffers from random and regular lockups, intermittent fuser errors and bizarre operation.  It can take several attempts for jobs to reach it on the network as the first couple of jobs can simply disappear into the ether.

I have complained to Konica but it has fallen on deaf ears.  If it wasn’t a £1000 printer it would take a trip out of the office window.  It is without doubt the most useless and infuriating piece of hardware I’ve ever had the misfortune to use.

In the last few days I had a problem printing from Publisher 2007  to the mc5450.  It started printing a dotted line around most, but not all of the page outline.  It’s not a subtle dotted line but a very prominent black dashed line.  Upgrading the printer driver appeared to cure it for a while but then it returned.  It’s not a crop mark and it doesn’t appear if I print the same document to my local Brother HL-4040CN.  I’ve tried resetting the driver back to defaults and switching every crop/bleed setting I can find but it’s still there.  It also doesn’t happen on all documents although it did happen on one other but then started printing it correctly again.

I have cured the problem and since I tend to post fixes to these irritations here on A Mind Lost for both my future use when I forget how I did it or for the maybe one other person in the world who might come across the same problem, here it is:

Install the PCL6 driver alongside the default Postscript driver and use it should you have this problem.  The fault may reside with Publisher 2007 and not the printer but since I can’t pin down a setting which is causing it I can’t narrow it down any further.