I have an Epson EPL-5800L mono laser printer. A couple of weeks ago I replaced the toner because it had run out. All went fine for around 400 pages of printing, but now I’m getting lines of printed text looking washed out, as if for one line the toner didn’t quite stick to the paper right. All the other lines on the page look fine, and it seems to happen quite a few lines of text appart – it never affects two adjacent lines. I’ve tried cleaning out the printer and the photo conductor unit to no avail. Sometimes the problem gets so bad that two out of every three printed pages are badly affected. Occasionaly a page comes out just fine as if there is no problem.

I’m at a loss, and don’t know whether there is a problem with the new toner drum, or the photoconductor drum or even something else in the printer and I’m not prepared to do diagnosis by expensive trial and error opf replacing parts (laser printer parts like the photo conductor drum and toner cartridges are NOT cheap!). According to the printer’s memory, the photo conductor drum is the original, and the toner cartridge I replaced was also the original. As the drum is good for 20,000 pages of printing, and each toner cartridge does around 6,000 pages then I should be well within the lifespan of the photo conductor.

Does anyone have any helpful suggestions of what the issue could be and how to easily fix it?