My Printer’s Prints Are Blurry

A printer that refuses to print is a close second on the frustration scale to one that happily spits out blurry pages. You’ve examined your file, printed it twice, received the same poor results both times, and looked at the clock: you don’t have time to waste. The cause could be anything from a low resolution source to paper texture. Troubleshoot your economy settings, resolution, and paper to solve the problem as quickly as possible.

Low-Resolution Source
When images that are too small are printed at a larger size, they become blurry. If you’re printing graphics from the Internet, they’re probably set to 72 pixels per inch, a very low resolution that will print blurry when enlarged to a 5-by-7 or larger. This is due to the printer’s higher resolution, which is typically 300 dots per inch. If you don’t have another source for the information you need to print, open the file in an image-editing programme and resize it to 300 pixels per inch. It will print smaller, but it will be sharper.

Humidity and Dampness
Paper acts like a sponge, absorbing moisture from the air’s humidity. Worse, if it gets wet, its fibres swell where they come into contact with water. Damp paper not only produces blurry output, especially on inkjet printers, but it also interacts poorly with the transport mechanisms in output devices, causing your hardware to jam. You don’t want to pull a ripped piece of damp paper from the depths of a printer. However, if you leave even a speck of debris behind, your device will continue to jam. It is best to avoid using damp paper in the printing process.

Textured Paper
Surface textures, like damaged paper, cause printing issues. That ream of linen-finish paper you bought at the office supply store to add a touch of polish to your presentation won’t necessarily improve the quality of your print because its irregular surface doesn’t accept ink or toner smoothly and consistently. When you look at a printout on textured paper with a magnifying glass, you’ll notice that the areas where the texture creates little valleys in the surface of the sheet hold less of the output image than the areas where the paper lacks texture.

Toner-Saver Printing
If your office printer has a toner-saving setting for draught output of long documents, it’s easy to activate it and then forget to turn it off when you’re ready to print your final output. Examine your application, document, and hardware settings, and disable economy mode before printing a page from your document. If your problem goes away, you can finish the job confident that your reprint will be of the desired quality.