Mississippi-Mud Forums

I have a HP 4550DN that was given to me as a whole unit. It has the duplexer and lower 500 sheet tray along with being maxed out on memory and a full set of brand new toner cartridges. The cartridges in the machine are all basically brand new hp cartridges to begin with. This printer has only had 753 pages run through it so far, of which I have done at least 650 while working on it.

The issue is that it works well, but the color and black fade bad on the left side of the page. Everything is good till about the last 1" to 1.5" on the page, then it fade quickly to about half of what it should be.

Things done so far:
Thorough cleaning of the machine with filtered and dried air.
All sensors cleaned and diagnostics run showing they are well within specs
New rollers installed (old ones were fine but I got a set for free so I swapped them in just in case)
Transfer belt removed and cleaned (was almost spotless to begin with, but checking all options)
Have run several blank pages of print through it to make sure the drum was completely cleared and static levels even. No smudges or anything on the blank pages.

At this point I am thinking either imaging drum or possibly the laser unit is having issues, but I am not sure. Wanted some other opinions on it.

I'm not a printer expert, but a color laser is finiky. I would start with the drum or the fuser. Both aren't cheap, but I know you can get another color laser for about $600ish. Weigh your options before you start spending $200 - $300 for parts that might not fix it.

I have been watching ebay and can snag a NIB drum for around $45 shipped to my door. I am going to try that next. The fuser seems to be working fine as the toner is full stuck to the paper, it's just faded on one side.

$600 wouldn't replace this printer. It was about a $2000-$2500 printer brand new.

Oh I'm not saying $600 for an identical replacment, but something on the cheaper side. Not sure how much you use it. Those are nice heavy duty printers.