Laser Printer Print Accuracy (Brother)

[daedalusminos]

I recently bought a Brother HL-L9470CDN colour laser printer for printing all sorts of business related stationary - instruction manuals, compliment slips, labels etc. For the past 17 years I've been buying Lexmark and this is my first venture into the Brother brand. The main reason for buying this particular model is the high page count toners included (12K).

When printing sa page of A4 labels I noticed the alignment was poor so did some investigating - basically if I print a 150mm x 150mm square it measure 148.5mm (across the page) x 149.8mm (down the page)

I'm currently in conversation with Brother (their 2nd line support chap was a joke - basically told me to Google the problem) but has anyone else experienced similar...have I just been lucky with Lexmark and I'm expecting too much?

 

[richie00boy]

I've got a cheap basic Brother mono laser (HL1210W or something like that) and it has a similar issue. Sometimes it's not that square on the page like the paper fed skewith, but mainly the scaling is not right. I found this out when I printed some drilling templates. I think I did find the X and Y scaling was out by different amounts as well.

 

[sako243]

All printers are a bit out of alignment. We've exclusively used Brother lasers for the last 15 years to print etching masks for printed circuit boards. Bear in mind we're trying to maintain an accuracy of significantly better than <0.1mm.

It may not be the printer itself but remember that laser printers fuse the toner with heat. If you're printing labels then I'm guessing it's glossy preglued stuff. If so then it's likely to stretch as it goes through the laser.

Everytime I get a new batch of transparencies I recalibrate my prints by printing a square, measuring it and tweaking the scaling on my prints.