Android prints better to M254DW than do Windows, Mac OS, iPadOS, Ubuntu. Why?

[ricecrispies]

I bought a used Color Laserjet Pro M254DW yesterday. I know that the toner cartridges are no good because of uneven, washed-out colour, smudges of colour on white areas, etc. However, before I invest good money in buying good quality cartridges, there is something else odd that I noticed that I would like to understand:

I tried printing an image from my Mac, iPad, laptop (using both Windows and Linux) and Android phone. All except Android produced prints that are hard to tell apart from each other. However Android did not. I have attached the original image I was trying to print, plus a photo of the Android version (left) alongside a version produced by one of the other OS's (right). I did two prints from Android, not one straight after the other, and they both gave the same result, so it doesn't seem to be a random thing that might be attributed to an intermittent problem with a cartridge.

As you can see, most of the print produced by Android is similar to the other one except for the areas of the original image that are in mid-dark grey, which Android prints as a mid grey in clear contrast to the light blue in the image, but the others reproduce as a light blue that is almost indistinguishable from the actual light blue.

Why is this? Will it mean that even if I replace the cartridges, I am going to have difficulty printing grey from MacOS etc?

 

[The Hat]

I am going to have difficulty printing grey from MacOS etc?

Trying to judge whether your new printer is making a balls of your prints or not with your own images will never work properly, use a known standard test print and that will tell all, regardless of which O/S you use..

 

[ricecrispies]

Trying to judge whether your new printer is making a balls of your prints or not with your own images will never work properly, use a known standard test print and that will tell all, regardless of which O/S you use..

I printed the colour test print from printertesting.com, firstly from the iPad and then from the Android phone, and I cannot tell the difference between the two. However, I do notice that the mid greys look a bit washed out and bluish in both prints. But I still don’t understand why the other image printed less inaccurately when sent from an Android device than from the other OS’s.

 

[The Hat]

But I still don’t understand why the other image printed less inaccurately when sent from an Android device

What format does the Android device use ?, have you got the choice to send it as PDF..

 

[ricecrispies]

I got some new toner cartridges of much better quality than the old ones, but I am still having this problem.

I printed the colour test page from printertesting.com and the prints were pretty well indistinguishable between Android and the iPad I used to compare it with. However, when I printed a greyscale image from the iPad and also from my Mac, each time the image had a strong blue tinge. But the same image printed from my Android phone printed in proper black and white.

In other words, my problem is not printing from Android. That is fine. The problem is printing from everything except Android.

 

[ricecrispies]

I’ve found out what was going wrong. Or at least five found out what was going wrong on the iPad, but I expect that the same solution will work on the other OSs.

I had assumed that leaving the media type as “auto select“ would mean that “plain paper“ would be selected, because nothing is more generic than plain paper, but I was wrong. I have to manually change the paper type each time I print.

Or is there a way to make my iPad remember my selection from the last time I printed?