Recently my Canon BJ-200 printer is producing printed text at about half strength of normal printing. This occurs with a new cartridge, even after I have cleaned the head according to the Canon manual. Interestingly, one older letter prints at the normal strength as do printouts from the ‘Help’ menu. I have set the graphics for the printer to the darkest setting. The computer is running Windows 98. Can you help?

Firstly, print a test page using the printer’s in-built test page function (i.e., this is not the Windows test page). If the printout is weak, the problem is with the printer itself. In this case there isn’t much advice I can give you except to have the printer looked at by a repair shop, or to buy a new printer! In the more likely situation that the test page prints correctly, then the problem is software related. Before we start the troubleshooting steps below, you may not be aware that some printers have different print quality modes. For example, my printer has ‘Best’, ‘Normal’, and ‘Draft’. The draft setting prints fast and at a lower quality than best, which prints slower. If you are printing some documents using draft quality, and others at normal quality, then the strength of the printed text will vary. Check the quality setting you are using to print your documents by going into your printer properties.

Assuming that the problem is not due to printing at a different print quality, let’s attempt to narrow down the problem by finding out whether it is system-wide or a localised problem, specific to a particular application. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ > ‘Printers’. In the window that appears, right-click on your printer and select ‘Properties’ from the context menu. On the Properties page, click ‘Print Test Page’. If this prints at normal strength and noting that printing from the help menu also prints at normal strength, then the problem seems to be specific to the program you are using to print documents. While you have set the graphics setting to darkest, this setting may not have been propagated to the print settings for the specific application where this problem is occurring. Go to the ‘File’ menu > ‘Print’ and select your printer and click ‘Properties’. Check the graphics setting and any other printer option setting. In particular, if your printer has the option to print in either ‘Black & White’ or ‘Color’ make sure that you select ‘Black & White’. The weak printing may also be due to low or empty colour cartridges. In the event that the print test page does not print at normal strength, make sure that you have the correct printer driver installed and then reinstall the driver. If you have reached this stage, without sitting in front of the machine myself, I would find it hard to give further instructions.