Blurry Printing on Kyocera FS-C5025N colour laserjet

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Level 1

10 points

Blurry Printing on Kyocera FS-C5025N colour laserjet

I am a recent convert to MAC after 20 years of MS/Windows. Some elements of the MAC experience have been excellent, some truly awful. In the latter category is trying to print documents from MS Word - when I do my documents are blurry.

Documents print from my Windows machines perfectly. I have read countless forums about how Apple renders fonts differently. But this is not a stylistic difference, this is almost unreadable.

Screen fonts, both on my Macbook and Samsung 19" external (DVI) are fine.

So I have two questions, one regarding the printer and one regarding the fonts.

1. can anyone advise the right process to ensure that I have installed the right printer driver? I have downloaded the MAC OS X 10.6 driver from the Kyocera Mita site and have tried running it from the download directory to see if that works, and also tried selecting it from within Preferences, Print, Add printer. Neither shows a measurable change - the printed fonts are still blurry.

2. Could it be that there are only a narrow range of fonts that print well under OS X? If so what are they? Calibri, Optima, Trebuchet, and others fall in the blurry camp.

Any gurus out there?

Macbook 15" Pro, 2.66Ghz i7, 8Gb 1067 RAM, Mac OS X (10.6.3), Various XP, Vista, Win 7 machines

Posted on Jun 11, 2010 8:16 AM

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Answer 1

PAHU

Level 6

16,723 points

Jun 11, 2010 7:05 PM in response to MosesMulenga

Hello and welcome to Apple Discussions.

I believe that the symptom you have is driver related. Whether it has something to do with the installation or how it is configured is what you need to determine. There is certainly no issue with the fonts you mention, or most of the others fonts I have ever used, when printing from MS Word 2008 on OS X 10.6. Also, if your printer is not Postscript, then the screen font will be treated as an image by the printer driver and rasterised before being sent to the printer.

So with regards to the blurry prints, this could be a result of registration black being used for text. This is where all colours (CMYK) are used to print the text instead of just black (K). Some drivers have a Grey Compensation setting which processes the text as black only instead of a grey colour, which is how you get the other colours in the mix. As to whether your driver has this setting or something similar may take a bit of time or reading of any manual that is available for the driver. But as a test, if your printer supports the PCL printer language, then you could create another printer queue to the printer but this time selecting Generic PCL Laser Printer for the Print Using menu. This Generic driver only prints with black so you would be able to see if this improves things. Note that the Generic PCL driver is defaulted to 300dpi, so you will need to open the Printer Features menu and change the resolution to 600dpi.

The resolution just mentioned could also be something to look at in the Kyocera driver. Now I don't know if your driver would have this setting, and if it did where you would find it, but it could be a contributor if only black is being used for the text.

That's about all I can suggest for now. Maybe others will contribute their thoughts on the issue. See how you go with the suggestions and reply if needed.

Pahu

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Answer 2

MosesMulenga Author

Level 1

10 points

Jun 13, 2010 3:01 PM in response to PAHU

Thanks for this suggestion and explanation, it's much appreciated. as I'm not particularly technical i'll work through it slowly, and see where I get to. With any luck it'll get me started in the right direction!

many thanks again. All the best.

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