Brother printer printing in grayscale

[kal]

FIX UPDATE: Play the clown music. After several cleaning cycles, the color started showing up in test prints. Turns out, this is a simple matter of ink dying out from being unused. Sometimes, things are silly

I connected my printer (Brother DCP-J100) for the first time today, following the instructions on Zorin Help. I think I did it correctly, and was able to print out a test page.

However, the test page was entirely grayscale, including (what I assume to be) the color wheel. Also while the quality of printed text was good, the color wheel itself had that horizontal lines problem.

I tried printing something else, a colorful image, and made sure the settings weren't on grayscale. Same problem though, plus the image was even very faded out? It was missing details, as if there was a problem printing out lighter colors. Some white portions of the image were fully blank.

Some other things I noticed:

1. The notifications for printing status seemed out of sync. Like it'd tell me the job was finished even while the printing was still happening.
2. There's a button to "clean print heads" and clicking that seems to do nothing.

[swarfendor437]

I think the driver install tool is not needed. Just posted to help another Zorin user who has a MFC-J5955DW.

How Zorin works with printers?

OK, started delving and found your original post which had a digit missing from the printer you have. I have found this one: The toolkit which is the first one is a .tar.gz (a zipped file) which can be ignored. The ones we want are the .deb packages for 64-bit (GNU/)Linux: system freezed - back shortly - nautilus crashing! The first one is the printer driver: mfcj5955dwpdrv-3.5.0-1.i386.deb Then the second one is for the scanner: brscan5-1.2.11-0.amd64.deb Then a button utility (scan t…

I have PM'd AZorin about the help page as I don't think the Brother tool is needed - this item installs all packages in one go - I think it is better to just install the .deb packages using Gdebi Package Manager.

[kal]

Thanks for the suggestion! I tried uninstalling all the packages and then manually reinstalling each one with gdebi, but it doesn't seem to have changed anything. The test print still comes out the same.

[kal]

FIX UPDATE: Play the clown music. After several cleaning cycles, the color started showing up in test prints. Turns out, this is a simple matter of ink dying out from being unused. Sometimes, things are silly

[swarfendor437]

I was almost going to mention something on those lines! At work there was a Canon MP printer that was not printing - taking the ink out and running the cartridge carrier under hot water solved it!